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THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING RACEBY GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce:--I rise with some trepidation to respond to this toast, because we have been assured upon high authority, altho after what we have heard this evening we can not believe it, that the English-speaking race speaks altogether too much. Our eloquent Minister in England recently congratulated the Mechanics' Institute at Nottingham that it had abolished its debating club, and said that he gladly anticipated the establishment in all great institutions of education of a professorship of Silence. I confess that the proposal never seemed to me so timely and wise as at this moment. If I had only taken a high degree in silence, Mr. Chairman, how cordially you would congratulate me and this cheerful company! When Mr. Phelps proceeded to say that Americans are not allowed to talk all the time, and that our orators are turned loose upon the public only once in four years, I was lost in admiration of the boundless sweep of his imagination. But when he said that the result of this quadrennial outburst was to make the country grateful that it did not come oftener, I saw that his case required heroic treatment, and must be turned over to Dr. Depew. I am sure, at least, that when our distinguished friends from England return to their native land they will hasten to besiege His Excellency to tell them where the Americans are kept who speak only once in four years. And if they will but remain through the winter, they will discover that if our orators are turned loose upon the public only once in four years, they are turned loose in private all the rest of the time; and if the experience and observation of our guests are as fortunate as mine, they will learn that there are certain orators of both branches of the English-speaking race--not one hundred miles from me at this moment--whom the public would gladly hear, if they were turned loose upon it every four hours. Wendell Phillips used to say that as soon as a Yankee baby could sit up in his cradle, he called the nursery to order and proceeded to address the house. If this Parliamentary instinct is irrepressible, if all the year round we are listening to orations, speeches, lectures, sermons, and the incessant, if not always soothing, oratory of the press, to which His Honor the Mayor is understood to be a closely attentive listener, we have at least the consolation of knowing that the talking countries are the free countries, and that the English-speaking races are the invincible legions of liberty. The sentiment which you have read, Mr. Chairman, describes in a few comprehensive words the historic characteristics of the English-speaking race. That it is the founder of commonwealths, let the miracle of empire which we have wrought upon the Western Continent attest:--its advance from the seaboard with the rifle and the ax, the plow and the shuttle, the teapot and the Bible, the rocking-chair and the spelling-book, the bath-tub and a free constitution, sweeping across the Alleghanies, over-spreading the prairies and pushing on until the dash of the Atlantic in their ears dies in the murmur of the Pacific; and as the wonderful Goddess of the old mythology touched earth, flowers and fruits answered her footfall, so in the long trail of this advancing race, it has left clusters of happy States, teeming with a population, man by man, more intelligent and prosperous than ever before the sun shone upon, and each remoter camp of that triumphal march is but a further outpost of English-speaking civilization. That it is the pioneer of progress, is written all over the globe to the utmost islands of the sea, and upon every page of the history of civil and religious and commercial freedom. Every factory that hums with marvelous machinery, every railway and steamer, every telegraph and telephone, the changed systems of agriculture, the endless and universal throb and heat of magical invention, are, in their larger part, but the expression of the genius of the race that with Watts drew from the airiest vapor the mightiest of motive powers, with Franklin leashed the lightning, and with Morse outfabled fairy lore. The race that extorted from kings the charter of its political rights has won, from the princes and powers of the air, the earth and the water, the secret of supreme dominion, the illimitable franchise of beneficent progress. That it is the stubborn defender of liberty, let our own annals answer, for America sprang from the defense of English liberty in English colonies, by men of English blood, who still proudly speak the English language, cherish English traditions, and share of right, and as their own, the ancient glory of England. No English-speaking people could, if it would, escape its distinctive name, and, since Greece and Judea, no name has the same worth and honor among men. We Americans may flout England a hundred times. We may oppose her opinions with reason, we may think her views unsound, her policy unwise; but from what country would the most American of Americans prefer to have derived the characteristic impulse of American development and civilization rather than England? What language would we rather speak than the tongue of Shakespeare and Hampden, of the Pilgrims and King James's version? What yachts, as a tribute to ourselves upon their own element, would we rather outsail than English yachts? In what national life, modes of thought, standards and estimates of character and achievement do we find our own so perfectly reflected as in the English House of Commons, in English counting-rooms and workshops, and in English homes? No doubt the original stock has been essentially modified in the younger branch. The American, as he looks across the sea, to what Hawthorne happily called "Our old home," and contemplates himself, is disposed to murmur: "Out of the eater shall come forth meat and out of the strength shall come forth sweetness." He left England a Puritan iconoclast; he has developed in Church and State into a constitutional reformer. He came hither a knotted club; he has been transformed into a Damascus blade. He seized and tamed a continent with a hand of iron; he civilizes and controls it with a touch of velvet. No music is so sweet to his ear as the sound of the common-school bell; no principle so dear to his heart as the equal rights of all men; no vision so entrancing to his hope as those rights universally secured. This is the Yankee; this is the younger branch; but a branch of no base or brittle fiber, but of the tough old English oak, which has weathered triumphantly the tempest of a thousand years. It is a noble contention whether the younger or the elder branch has further advanced the frontiers of liberty, but it is unquestionable that liberty, as we understand it on both sides of the sea, is an English tradition; we inherit it, we possess it, we transmit it, under forms peculiar to the English race. It is as Mr. Chamberlain has said, liberty under law. It is liberty, not license; civilization, not barbarism; it is liberty clad in the celestial robe of law, because law is the only authoritative expression of the will of the people, representative government, trial by jury, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and of the press--why, Mr. Chairman, they are the family heirlooms, the family diamonds, and they go wherever in the wide world go the family name and language and tradition. Sir, with all my heart, and, I am sure, with the hearty assent of this great and representative company, I respond to the final aspiration of your toast: "May this great family in all its branches ever work together for the world's welfare." Certainly its division and alienation would be the world's misfortune. That England and America have had sharp and angry quarrels is undeniable. Party spirit in this country, recalling old animosity, has always stigmatized with the English name whatever it opposed. Every difference, every misunderstanding with England has been ignobly turned to party account; but the two great branches of this common race have come of age, and wherever they may encounter a serious difficulty which must be accommodated they have but to thrust demagogues aside, to recall the sublime words of Abraham Lincoln, "With malice toward none, with charity for all," and in that spirit, and in the spirit and the emotion represented in this country by the gentlemen upon my right and my left, I make bold to say to Mr. Chamberlain, in your name, there can be no misunderstanding which may not be honorably and happily adjusted. For to our race, gentlemen of both countries, is committed not only the defense, but the illustration of constitutional liberty. The question is not what we did a century ago, or in the beginning of this century, with the lights that shone around us, but what is our duty to-day, in the light which is given to us of popular government under the republican form in this country, and the parliamentary form in England. If a sensitive public conscience, if general intelligence should not fail to secure us from unnatural conflict, then liberty will not be justified of her children, and the glory of the English-speaking race will decline. I do not believe it. I believe that it is constantly increasing, and that the colossal power which slumbers in the arms of a kindred people will henceforth be invoked, not to drive them further asunder, but to weld them more indissolubly together in the defense of liberty under law. 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