Part 17

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--I rise to thank you for your most generous greeting for myself, for my friends, and for all of the Navy that you have included in the various remarks which have been made. I want you to understand that I do not take it all to myself, but that this is divided with all the men; and while with great hesitation I attempt to make a speech at all, I feel that this is an opportunity which should not be thrown away. I do not propose to say anything, as you might expect, about the battle of Santiago, but I would like to say a few words about the lessons which we have learned, or should learn, from that battle.

First, I would say that neither that battle nor any other that I know of, was won by chance. It requires an adequate means to accomplish such a result. That battles are not won by chance, you have only to consider for a moment a few--one or two--of the principal battles of the world. Not that I mean to class the battle of Santiago as one of the great battles of the world--but just as an illustration. You will see the result of adequate means in the case of the battle of Waterloo, for instance. When we remember that Wellington fought that battle with 130,000 men opposed to Napoleon's 80,000, we are not surprised that it was Wellington's battle. Take another decisive battle--Sedan. When the Germans had 125,000 men opposed to 84,000, it does not seem possible that the result could have been anything else.

So we might go over a long list. The sea fights furnish many instances where it was found that the most powerful fleet was the one that was successful. Nelson was always in favor of overwhelming fleets, though he did not have them always at his command. Our own war of 1812 furnishes numerous instances where our victories depended upon the superior force. It seems unnecessary that such self-evident truths should be stated before this assemblage of intelligent gentlemen, but we are apt to forget that a superior force is necessary to win a victory. As I said before, victory is not due to chance. Had superior force not been our own case at the battle of Santiago, had it been the reverse, or had it been materially modified, what turned out to be a victory might have been a disaster; and that we must not forget.

The second lesson, if we may call it so, is closely allied, perhaps, to the first. Shall we learn the lesson which is taught us in this recent war? Shall we rest on the laurels which we may have won, or shall we prepare for the future? Shall we not imagine our foe in the future, as might well be the case, to be superior to the one over which we have been victorious? It is a question that comes home to us directly. On July 3d, when Cervera was returned, on board the "Iowa," to the mouth of the harbor at Santiago, he requested permission to send a telegram reporting the state of the case to Captain-General Blanco. Of course, no objection was raised to this, and Cervera wrote out a telegram and sent it on board the flagship to be scrutinized and forwarded to Blanco. He stated in this telegram that he obeyed his (General Blanco's) orders and left the harbor of Santiago at 9.30 Sunday morning, and "now," he said, "it is with the most profound regret that I have to report that my fleet has been completely destroyed. We went out to meet the forces of the enemy, which outnumbered us three to one."

I had so much sympathy with old Admiral Cervera that I did not have it in my heart to modify or change in any respect the report which he proposed to make to Captain-General Blanco. I felt that the truth would be understood in the course of time, and that while I would not now, or then, under any circumstances, admit that he was outnumbered in the proportion of three to one, I still felt that he should be at liberty to defend himself in that manner.

The fleets that were opposed to each other on that Sunday morning were, as regards the number of the ships, about six to seven. Leaving out the torpedo-destroyers and the "Gloucester," which may be said not to have been fighting ships, the proportion was six to four. The fleet of the Spaniards consisted of four beautiful ships. I think I am stating the case within bounds when I say that they were--barring their condition at that time, which, of course, we did not all know, in many respects--that they were all our imaginations had led us to suppose. We outnumbered them, but this is only another illustration of the fact which I wish to bring before you, that it is necessary to have a superior force to make sure of victory in any case.

It seems to me that you, gentlemen, who are so influential in determining and deciding what the Navy of the United States should be, should bear this emphatically in mind--that we must have more ships, more guns, and all that goes to constitute an efficient navy. I am not advocating a large navy. I do not believe that we should support a large navy, but that it should be much larger than it is at present I think you will all concede. The increased territory which we have added to our country will probably produce an increase in our chances for war by at least one hundred per cent.--not that we need increase the Navy to that extent--but probably will.

NOAH HUNT SCHENCK

TRUTH AND TRADE

[Speech of Rev. Dr. Noah Hunt Schenck at the 110th annual banquet of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, New York City, May 14, 1878. In introducing Dr. Schenck, the President, Samuel D. Babcock, said: "The loose manner in which the Dinner Committee have conducted their business is now becoming evident. The chairman has got considerably mixed on the toasts. You may recollect that the toast to which Dr. Chapin responded referred to twins [Rev. Dr. Edwin H. Chapin had spoken to the toast 'Commerce and Capital, twin forerunners of civilization and philanthropy'], and here is one that refers to matrimony, and it is very evident that this one ought to have preceded the other. [Laughter and applause.] Eighth regular toast, 'Truth and Trade: those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.'"]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--It were an ambitious effort to hold the attention of this distinguished body directly after its ears had been ravished by the eloquent deliverances of the finished orators who have just preceded me. In fact, I can scarcely imagine why you enlist another voice from Brooklyn, unless it be to show that there is a possibility of exhausting Brooklyn, and you would make it my sad office to afford you the illustration. [Applause.]

The Chairman said at the beginning that the best speeches were to be at the last. You have already discovered that this was designed for irony, for thus far the speeches have been incomparable, but mine is to be the beginning of the end. [Laughter and applause.]

I know that what I say is true when I charge the Chairman with irony, for do not I feel his iron entering my soul? [Laughter and applause.] It is an act of considerable temerity, even though the ground has been so gracefully broken by the Rev. Dr. Chapin, for a clergyman to rise before this common-sense body of three hundred business men (unless we had you in our churches), for you well know that this precious quality of common sense is supposed to have its habitat almost entirely with business men, and rarely with the clergy.

I know full well that the men of the pulpit are held to be wanting in practical knowledge, and that we know but little of the dark and devious ways of this naughty world. So that, rising here, I feel as if I were but a little one among a thousand, and yet I would venture to submit that the clergy are not wholly unpractical. Nay, I sometimes am led to think that the men of my cloth are the most practical, common-sense business men in the world. [Laughter and applause.]

There is certainly no class of men who can make so little go so far, who can live so comfortably on such small incomes, who can fatten on pastures where the members of this Chamber of Commerce would starve. [Applause and laughter.] There is no class of men that go through life in such large proportion without bankruptcy. [Laughter and applause.]

While 25,000 merchants in the United States during the four years from 1871 to 1875 failed in business, with liabilities amounting to $800,000,000 (I quote statistics from accepted authority), I do not believe that one-quarter of that number of clergymen failed [laughter and applause], or that their liabilities amounted to anything like that sum. [Laughter and applause.] I have seen the estimate that eighty-five per cent. of merchants fail within two years after they embark in business, notwithstanding their common sense, and that only three per cent, make more money in the long run than is enough for a comfortable livelihood.

Having thus attempted to fortify my waning "Dutch courage" by an off-hand attack upon my hospitable entertainers, and having in some sense, even though it be Pickwickian, vindicated my cloth, let me go on for a moment and cut my garment according to it. [Laughter and applause.]

I have been asked to say a word upon the wedlock of Truth and Trade, and advocate the idea that what in the nature of things has been joined together of God, should not, should never be sundered by man. We know that Truth is eternal. Trade, thank God, is not. [Laughter and applause.] Still, so far as time and earth are concerned, trade endures from first to last and everywhere. God married it to truth with the fiat that men should eat bread in the sweat of their faces. From that moment men have been wrangling in every court of conscience and society to secure decrees of divorce. How manifold and multitudinous the tricks, dodges, and evasions to which men have resorted to be rid of the work which conditions bread. [Laughter and applause.] The great art of life in the estimate of the general, said a great economist, is to have others do the face-sweating and themselves the bread-eating. [Laughter and applause.]

But all along the line of the centuries the divine utterances have given forth with clarion clearness that God would have men illustrate morals and religion in the routine of business life. And so in all the upper levels of civilization we observe that society points with pride to the integrity that is proof against the temptations of trade. The men who have honored sublime relations of business and religion are they whom the world has delighted to honor. With but rare exceptions trade, wherever it has been prosperous, has had truth for its wedded partner. For the most part, wherever men have achieved high success in traffic, it has been not upon the principle that "Honesty is the best policy," for honesty is never policy, but upon the basis of fidelity to truth and right under every possible condition of things. The man who is honest from motives of policy will be dishonest when policy beckons in that direction. The men who have illumined the annals of trade are those who have bought the truth and sold it not, who held it only to dispense it for the welfare of others.

We cannot too highly honor the temper of that generation of business men who half a century ago sternly refused to compromise with any form of deceit in the details of traffic, visiting with the severest penalties those who at all impinged upon the well-accepted morals of trade. The story is told of a young merchant who, beginning business some fifty years ago, overheard one day a clerk misrepresenting the quality of some merchandise. He was instantly reprimanded and the article was unsold. The clerk resigned his position at once, and told his employer that the man who did business that way could not last long. But the merchant did last, and but lately died the possessor of the largest wealth ever gathered in a single lifetime.

Permit me another incident and this not from New York, but Philadelphia. One of the Copes had but just written his check for $50 for some local charity, when a messenger announced the wreck of an East Indiaman belonging to the firm, and that the ship and cargo were a total loss. Another check for $500 was substituted at once, and given to the agent of the hospital with the remark: "What I have God gave me, and before it all goes, I had better put some of it where it can never be lost." [Applause.]

Such illustrations as these are not infrequent in the biographies of those noble men who in days gone by as well as in our own times, have never divorced truth from trade, but have always reverenced the sacred relations. I dare venture the remark that the prosperity of a nation is more largely dependent upon the probity of its merchants than upon any other one class of men. [Applause.] This because of their numbers, their influence over so many who are subject to them in business, and their close relation to, and important control over, the financial interests of the country.

What a wide area of opportunity is afforded in the counting-room, where so many students of trade are preparing for the uncertain future! Accept, I beseech you, the responsibility of moulding the characters of your young men and so prepare a generation of merchants who shall know of nothing but honesty and honor, and who will cherish nobility of sentiment in all their business transactions. [Applause.]

And can you not help the world abroad as well as at home? I believe that merchants engaged in commerce with foreign nations, have it within the scope and purview of their business relations to do as much for the propagation of Christian truth as the Church itself. If your ventures are intrusted to the direction of men of character; if your agents are men who recognize in practice the morals of the religion they profess, you will not only not negative as now, alas! but too often the efforts of the Church's envoys, by the frequent violations of Christian law, on the part of those who propose to be governed by it; but through the illustrations you can send out of Christian consistency--by the living representatives of our higher civilization, which you can furnish to remote nations, to say nothing of the voluntary agency in scattering the printed powers of our faith in all quarters of the globe, how much may not be accomplished in this and in other ways by your men and your ships--Trade thus travelling round the world with Truth by her side, helping each other and healing the nations. [Applause.]

WINFIELD SCOTT SCHLEY

THE NAVY IN PEACE AND IN WAR

[Speech of Winfield S. Schley at the eighteenth annual dinner of the New England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1898. The President, Stephen W. Dana, presented Admiral Schley in these words: "Admiral Schley needs no introduction from me--he speaks for himself."]

MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--I am very much in the condition of the gentleman who, being about to be married and having had his wedding suit brought home a day before the event, returned it to the tailor with instructions to increase the girth just two inches. His explanation was that not enough room had been left to accommodate the wedding breakfast he had to eat or for the emotion that was to follow the event.

I am always glad to meet my countrymen anywhere and everywhere. They stand for all that is representative; they stand for all that is progressive; they stand for all that represents humanity, and they stand for all that is fair-minded, high-minded, and honorable. As to those of us who by the circumstances of our service are obliged to pass the greater part of our lives away from home, away from kindred, and away from the flag, it may be difficult to understand how to keep the altar of one's patriotism burning when we are separated from the sweetest and kindest influences of life and performing a service and a duty that are outside of the public observation. But there is a large-heartedness at home that never forgets us. We are bound to our country by ties that are not only sweet in their nature, but the circumstances of service generate a love of home and a patriotism that are the surest guarantees of the welfare and the safety of our people.

The Navy is that arm of the public defence the nature of whose duties is dual in that they relate to both peace and war. In times of peace the Navy blazes the way across the trackless deep, maps out and marks the dangers which lie in the routes of commerce, in order that the peaceful argosies of trade may pursue safe routes to the distant markets of the world, there to exchange the varied commodities of commerce. It penetrates the jungle and the tangle of the inter-tropical regions. It stands ready to starve to death or to die from exposure. It pushes its way into the icy fastnesses of the North or of the South, in order that it may discover new channels of trade. It carries the influence of your power and the beneficent advantages of your civilization to the secluded and hermit empires of the Eastern world, and brings them into touch with our Western civilization and its love of law for the sake of the law rather than for fear of the law's punishments. It stands guard upon the outer frontiers of civilization, in pestilential climates, often exposed to noisome disease, performing duties that are beyond the public observation but yet which have their happy influence in maintaining the reputation and character of our country and extending the civilizing agency of its commerce.

The bones of the officers and men of the Navy lie in every country in the world, or along the highways of commerce; they mark the resting-places of martyrs to a sense of duty that is stronger than any fear of death. The Navy works and strives and serves, without any misgivings and without any complaints, only that it may be considered the chief and best guardian of the interests of this people, of the prestige of this nation, and of the glory and renown of its flag.

These are some of the duties of peace, which has its triumphs "no less renowned than war." But it is the martial side of the Navy that is the more attractive one to us. It is that side of its duty which presents to us its characters who have written their names and their fames in fire. No matter what may be our ideas of civilization or how high our notions of peace, there is no one of us who has not felt his heart beat a little bit faster and his blood course a little bit more rapidly when reading of the daring and thrilling deeds of such men as John Paul Jones or of Decatur or of Stewart or of Hull or of Perry or of MacDonald or of Tatnall or of Ingram or of Cushing or of Porter or of Farragut.

The war so happily ended has added new names to the galaxy of naval worthies. New stars are in the firmament. The records indicate that your naval representatives have been faithful to the lesson of their traditions, that they have been true to their history, whilst the men of our Navy have shown that they have lost none of the skill and none of the tact that they have inherited. But they have proven again that a generation of men who are able to defend their title to the spurs they inherited are proper successors to their progenitors. [Applause.]

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

THE BEGINNINGS OF ART

[Speech of Heinrich Schliemann at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy, London, May 5, 1877. Sir Gilbert Scott, the eminent architect, took the chair in the absence of Sir Frederick Grant, the President of the Academy. In introducing Dr. Schliemann, Sir Gilbert Scott spoke as follows: "There is one gentleman present among us this evening who has special claims upon an expression of our thanks. Antiquarian investigation is emphatically a subject of our own day. More has been discovered of the substantial vestiges of history in our own than probably in any previous age; and it only needs the mention of the names of Champollion, Layard, Rawlinson, and Lipsius to prove that we have in this age obtained a genuine knowledge of the history of art as practised in all previous ages. Not only have we obtained a correct understanding of the arts of our own race as exemplified in our own mediæval antiquities, but lost buildings of antiquity such as the Egyptian labyrinth, the palace of Nineveh, the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the temple and statues of Olympia, and the temple of Diana at Ephesus have been re-discovered and disinterred. ["Hear! Hear!"] There remained, however, one great hiatus. We knew something of the more archaic periods of Greek art, and we knew that on the gate of Mycenæ there were evidences of an art far more archaic and apparently not allied with true Hellenic art, but we knew no more nor had an idea how the great gulf in art history was to be bridged over. It still remains a great gulf, but Dr. Schliemann by his excavations, first on the site of Troy and then of Mycenæ, has brought to open daylight what, without prejudging questions as yet _sub judice_, seem to be the veritable works of the heroes of the Iliad; and if he has not yet actually solved the mysteries which shroud that age, he has brought before us a perfect wealth of fact at the least calculated to sharpen our antiquarian appetite for more certain knowledge. Knowing that Dr. Schliemann is like one in old times, who, while longing to tell of the Atrides and of Cadmus, yet allowed the chords of his heart to vibrate to softer influences, I will, while proposing his health, conjoin with his name that of his energetic fellow-explorer, Madame Schliemann."]

MR. PRESIDENT, MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN:--You have been pleased to confer upon me two of the greatest honors which this country can possibly bestow upon a foreigner--first, by your kind invitation to this hospitable banquet to meet the most illustrious statesmen, the most eminent scholars, and the most distinguished artists; and secondly, by your toast to my health. In warmly thanking you, I feel the greatest satisfaction to think that for these signal honors, I am solely indebted to my labors in Troy and Mycenæ. ["Hear! Hear!"]