glad that you have come, and will cherish long in
our remembrance this great event.
MILITARY INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS AND
COLLEGES
The Century Magazine, November 3,1893
You ask my opinion of the suggestion of Lafayette
Post, G. A. R., of New York city, that military in
struction and drill be used in all schools for boys. It
is good in every aspect of it good for the boys,
good for the schools, and good for the country. A
free, erect, graceful carriage of the body is an ac
quisition and a delight. It has a value in commerce
as well as in war. Arms and legs are distressing
appendages to a boy under observation, until he has
been taught the use of them in repose. The chin is
too neighborly with the chest, and the eyes find the
floor too soon; they need to have the fifteen paces
marked off. The sluggish need to be quickened,
the quick taught to stand, and the willful to have
no will. The disputatious need to learn that there
are conditions where debate is inadmissible; the
power and beauty there is in a company moved
by one man and as one man. Athletic sports
have their due, perhaps undue, attention in
367
368 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
most of the colleges and high schools ; but in the graded
schools, within my observation, exercise is casual and
undirected. None of these exercises or sports is,
however, a substitute for military drill; and some of
them create a new need for it. A good oarsman
need not be erect or graceful; a good arm and
plenty of wind meet his needs. The champion "cy
clist" is not apt to have square shoulders. The foot
ball captain is so padded that a safe judgment can
hardly be formed as to his natural "lines"; but a
good leg and momentum seem to me a non-expert
to be his distinctive marks. In baseball the pitcher
seems, to an occasional observer, to have parted with
all his natural grace to endow the curved ball.
A military drill develops the whole man, head,
chest, arms and legs, proportionately; and so pro
motes symmetry, and corrects the excesses of other
forms of exercise. It teaches quickness of eye and
ear, hand and foot; qualifies men to step and act in
unison; teaches subordination; and, best of all, qual
ifies a man to serve his country. The flag now gen
erally floats above the school-house; and what more
appropriate than that the boys should be instructed
in the defense of it? It will not lower their grade
marks in their book recitations, I am sure. If rightly
used, it will wake them up, make them more healthy,
develop their pride, and promote school order. In
the centennial parades in New York, in April, 1889,
the best marching I saw was that of some of your
MILITARY INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS 369
school children. The alignment of the company front
was better than that of the regulars or of the Sev
enth regiment.
If all the school boys of the North had, from
1830 on, been instructed in the schools of the sol
dier and of the company, and in the manual of arms,
how much precious time would have been saved in
organizing the Union army in 1861. We were in
a very low state, as a people, in military knowledge
and training when the great civil war broke out
volunteers in plenty, but few soldiers. I very well
remember how hard it was for me to learn which
was the right of the company, and to understand
why it continued to be the right when the right
about had made it the left; and how we had, in 1862,
to send to a distant city to find a drill-master com
petent to instruct the company officers, not one of
whom could go through the manual of arms; and
how the regiment, after a few half-learned lessons in
the company drill, was sent to the seat of war with
guns which they had never loaded or fired. Fortu
nately, the men had the American adaptability and
quickness, and our adversary only a little better prep
aration. It will not be safe to allow war to come upon
us again in that state, for war's pace has greatly
quickened, and the arms of precision now in use call
for a trained soldier. Under our system we shall
never have a large standing army, and our strength
and safety are in a general dissemination of mili-
37O VIEWS OF 'AN EX-PRESIDENT
tary knowledge and training among the people.
What the man and citizen ought to know in order
to the full discharge of his duty to his country should
be imparted to the boy. Nothing will so much aid
to enlarge our state militia, and to give it efficiency
and character, as the plan proposed. The military
taste and training acquired in the school will carry
our best young men into the militia organizations
and make those organizations reliable conservators of
public order, and ready and competent defenders of
the national honor.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE NEW ENGLAND
SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Continental Hotel, Philadelphia, December 22, 1893
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW
ENGLAND SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA When my
good friend and your good neighbor and presi
dent, Mr. Charles Emory Smith, invited me to
be present to-night, I felt a special demand upon
me to yield to his request. I thought I owed him
some reparation for appointing him to an office,
the emoluments of which did not pay his expenses.
Your cordial welcome to-night crowns three days of
most pleasurable stay in this good city of Philadelphia.
The days have been a little crowded. I think there
have been what our friends of "the four hundred"
would probably call eight 'distinct functions, but your
cordiality and the kind words of your presiding officer
quite restore my fatigue and suggest to me that I shall
rightly repay your kindness by making a very short
speech.
It is my opinion that these members of the New
England Society are very creditable descendants of
372 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
the forefathers. I am not right sure that the fore
fathers would share this opinion if they were
here, but that would be because of the fact
that, notwithstanding the load of substantial vir
tues which they carried through life, their taste had
not been highly cultivated.
I dread this function which I am now attempting
to discharge more than any other that ever meets
me in life. The after-dinner speaker is unlike the
poet; he is not born, he is made. I am
frequently compelled to meet in disastrous com
petition about some dinner table gentlemen who
have already had their speeches set up in the news
paper offices. They are brought to you as if they
were fresh from the lip. You are served with what
they would have you believe to be "impromptu
boned turkey." And yet, if you could see
into the recesses of their intellectual kitchens,
.you would see the days of careful preparation which
have been given to those spontaneous utterances.
The after-dinner speaker needs to find some
where some one un worked joker's quarry,
where some jokes have been left without a label on
them. He needs to acquire the art of seeming to
pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech,
as by the wayside, some flower of rhetoric; he seems
to have passed it and to have plucked it casually,
but it is a boutonniere with tin-foil around it.
You can see upon close inspection the
NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA 373
mark of the planer on his well-turned sentences.
The competition with gentlemen who are so cul
tivated is severe upon one who must speak absolute
ly upon the impulse of the occasion. It is either in
capacity or downright laziness that has kept me
from competing in this field which I have described.
It occurred to me to-day to inquire why you had to
associate six states in order to get up a respectable
society. Now, .my friend Halstead and I have no
such trouble. We are Ohio born, and we do not
need to associate any other state in order to get up
a good society wherever there is a civil list of the
government. If you would adopt the liberal charter
measure of the Ohio society I have no doubt you
could subdivide yourselves into six good societies.
The Ohio society admits to membership everybody
who has lived voluntarily six months in Ohio. No
involuntary resident is permitted to come in.
But this association of these states and the name
New England is part of an old classification of the
states that we used to have in the geographies, and
all of that classification is gone except New En
gland and the South. The West has disappeared,
and the Middle West can not be identified. Where
is the West? Why, just now at the point of that
long chain of islands that put off from the Alaskan
coast, and, if I am to credit what I read, for I have
no sources of information now except the not abso
lutely reliable newspaper press, there are some who
374 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
believe that there are wicked men who want to
hitch the end of that chain on to another island far
ther out in the sea. If that should be done, the West
would become the East, for I think the Orient has
generally been counted to be the East.
I would not, however, suggest a division of the
New England Society. It is well enough to keep
up an association that is one, not only of neighbor
hood and historical associations, but of sentiment:
Let the New England Society live, and I fancy it
will not be long till you enjoy the distinction of be
ing the only great subdivision of the states. For,
my fellow-citizens, whatever barriers prejudice may
raise, whatever obstruction the interests of men may
interpose, whatever may be the outrages of cruelty
to stay the march of New England, that which made
the subdivision of the Southern states and all that
separated them from the states of the West and of
the North will be obliterated.
I am not sure, though the story runs so, that I
have a New England strain. The fact is that I have
recently come to the conclusion that my family was
a little overweighted with ancestry, and I have been
looking after posterity.
One serious word, gentlemen. The New England
character and the influence of New England men and
women have made their impress upon the whole coun
try; for even in the South, during times of slavery,
educated men and women from New England were
NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA 375
the tutors and instructors of the youth of the South
in the plantation home. The love of education, the
resolve that it should be general, the love of home
with all the pure and sacred influences that cluster
about it, are elements in the New England char
acter that have a saving force incalculable in this
great nation in which we live.
Your civil institutions have been free and high and
clean, from the old town-meeting days until now.
New England has believed in and practices the free
election and the fair count.
But gentlemen, I can not enumerate all of your
virtues; time is brief and the category long. Will
you permit me to thank you and your honored
president for your gracious reception to-night?
FOUNDERS' DAY AT STANFORD
UNIVERSITY
THE FIRST MEMORIAL EXERCISES HELD AT THE
UNIVERSITY
March 9, 1894
PRESIDENT JORDAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
What I shall say to-day will be the unstudied tribute of
a friend to the memory of a friend. My acquaint
ance with Governor Stanford was not long a half
score of years would cover it but I saw him dur
ing those years under many varying conditions,
and was now and then brought into such touch
with him that his mind and heart were very fully
revealed to me.
This visit to California, to Palo Alto, to the Le-
land Stanford Junior University, is one that I have
looked forward to for a year with great interest
and with great anticipations. Not a little of that
interest was centered in the fact that the arrange
ment involved a meeting with Governor Stanford
here at the scene of his greatest work. My com
ing is saddened by his absence. As I remarked the
376
FOUNDERS DAY AT STANFORD 377
other day to the students, I realize now first that
he is dead. When one dies at a distance from us we
hear of the event and our minds receive it as a truth,
but the heart does not realize it until we come to
some place where we might expect to meet our
friend. It is the vacant chair in the family; it is the
absence from accustomed places that brings to us
the realization of the loss of a friend. I had learned
to have a very high regard for Governor Stanford;
to see in him some of the noblest attributes that
adorn human nature, and chief among these was
the gentle, loving character of his nature. Too often
those who have been enabled by successful business
enterprise to gather about them all the luxuries of
wealth so that everything is tributary to them, come
to be unsympathetic and forgetful of their fellow-
men, to be narrow and selfish. Such was not the
influence of his great possessions upon him. His
wealth was a vehicle of charity. We have not a
few families in this country who, from generation
to generation, seem to concentrate all their ener
gies upon the accumulation of great fortunes and
the entailment of them upon their children. Such
as these may be stars of the first magnitude when
only four hundred are assembled, but the Lick tele
scope can not find them when the world is gathered.
Wealth has come to be condemned; to be under
suspicion, because of its selfishness; not because it
is in itself a thing that has not high and great uses
378 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
not because it is necessarily a barrier over which
human hearts may not pass.
The considerateness of Governor Stanford, dur
ing the four years that I spent last at Washington,
always touched me. He seemed to realize the bur
dens of the great office which I held, and always
approached me in a manner almost apologetic, that
he should intrude any further care or business upon
my attention. In all his relations to men in public
life he was modest, kindly and considerate, and
often added a suggestion of practical wisdom to the
consultation that roused our admiration and not in
frequently secured our adherence.
What a great thing it is when one may have a
Founders* Day to commemorate his birth! How
short human life is, and how inadequate! When
men die we say their earthly work is ended; and
for a majority, and to a majority, to our limited
observation, it is largely true. Of course, no good
life ends at death; but the threads of influence such
lives have started extend over limited spaces, touch a
few hearts, and are undiscovered to the common
eye. There is not time in a human life to complete
a great work. There must be succession. Perpe
tuity is essential to great works; and no one more
fully realized this than Governor Stanford. He
was an organizer. His thoughts were large, and he
understood the philosophy of bringing other men
into partnership with his designs, of enlarging the
FOUNDERS' DAY AT STANFORD 379
individual touch by co-operation. Take the two
great enterprises with which he was associated. The
transcontinental railway what a wide and strong
organization was necessary to its accomplishment!
Not one man! What could one pick or one shovel
or one engineer do in the construction of that great
enterprise? It was a scheme that needed to have
brought into it many men of diverse mental attain
ments, and the muscle of many laborers, and all
these into a system that worked like a perfected ma
chine all this he did. And this great highway of
commerce, which in the future years shall bear an
increasing traffic between the East and the West,
and shall carry, with increasing comfort, speed and
safety, generations yet to be born, is one of the
great works that will perpetually praise him. This
is one of his biographers, and it has written on the
rocky faces of the Sierra canons the story of his
participation in one of the great achievements of the
century.
This university is his other and better biographer
not a highway of commerce but a highway of
the soul, upon which the aspiring feet may perpet
ually be borne to the heights of truth and learning.
And here, how perfectly can we see this fine faculty
of design; of organization; of bringing in that
which is needful; of using the element of perpetu
ity. For, when these learned men who now instruct,
and this generation of students, have passed away,
380 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
there will be new instructors standing yet nearer to
the summits of truth, to instruct a generation of
students full of a nobler enthusiasm for learning
and for the elevation of the race. It is as men as
sociate themselves with such institutions that their
memory is perpetuated. Why is Washington freshly
and ever in our hearts? Why is his natal day per
petually kept in remembrance? Because he associ
ated himself with the deliverance of the colonies
from foreign domination and oppression, and with
the institution of a system of government that has
brought liberty, happiness and freedom to this great
continent, and will carry them on to generations to
come. Napoleon we read of; we analyze his char
acter and study his military genius much as one of
these professors and with little more reverence
might examine and explain to a class the articulated
skeleton of some unknown man. He did not asso
ciate himself with any great thing in the interest
of man, with any great state or institution that had
perpetuity.
But I will not detain you longer. Our sorrow
for the loss of a friend is greatly mitigated when
we can assemble as we do to-day, surrounded by
evidences that, not only in the family circle, but
throughout all this coast, throughout all these states,
and, indeed, throughout the world, he will be held in
perpetual veneration and respect.
One loved child was lost, but the promise the
FOUNDERS* DAY AT STANFORD 381
Abrahamic promise shall be fulfilled to him his
children shall be more than the sands of the sea, for
multitude.
IN PRESENTING MR. McKINLEY,
Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis, September 25, 1894
MY FELLOW-CITIZENS The delightful duty has
been assigned me by the state central committee of
the Republican party of Indiana to preside over this
great meeting. I am to be its chairman, not its
speaker, and I congratulate you on that fact.
I brought the distinguished gentleman, to whom you
are to listen, to this hall this afternoon without send
ing any courier in advance to find whether there were
enough people for him to speak to.
I notice in the audience here to-day, with great
satisfaction, the presence of many of our older fel
low-citizens. The old men are fond of telling of
the "good old times," but the times to which they look
back with so much delight are glorified in the fact
that the processes of nature and of providence have
covered the things that were hard and brought out
in the memory those things that were sweet and
pleasant. But the good times which I have in mind
are not good old times, but very young good times,
382
IN PRESENTING MR. MCKINLEY '383
so young that only the unweaned babes have no
memory of them. Only two years ago this country
was not only the most prosperous country in the
world for that it had been before but it stood
upon the highest pinnacle of prosperity that it had
ever before attained. This is not the ver
dict of politicians; it is the verdict of the com
mercial reporter; it is the expressed opinion of those
men who make a profession of studying business
conditions. The last two years have been years of
distress and disaster.
The losses of them defy the skill of the calcu
lator. It has been said, I think not without reason,
that they exceed the cost of the great civil war.
These losses have not been class losses; they have
been distributed. The holder of stocks and bonds
has found his wealth shrinking, and so has the
farmer, and the workingman has found his wages
shrinking. There has been a general participation
in the calamities of the last two years as there was
a general participation in the prosperity of the pre
ceding years. The great national debts, like those of
the civil war, have sometimes their adequate compen
sation. Great as was the cost of the war for the
Union, we feel that it was adequately compensated
in the added glory that was given to the flag and in
the added security that was given to our civil insti
tutions and the unity of the nation.
But the losses of these last two years have no such
384 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
compensating thought. There is no good to be got
ten out of them, except for guidance. They seem to
be of retributive nature, like the swamps into which
the traveler has unwarily driven, that have no amel
iorating circumstances, except as they teach him to
keep on the foot-hill and to follow the road that is
on the hilltops. Our people seem to be inclined to
make the most that can be made out of these years
of disaster. We were told in the old times the rich
were getting richer and the poor poorer; and to cure
that imaginary ill our political opponents have
brought on a time when everybody is getting poorer.
I think that I remember to have heard of an inscrip
tion once upon a tombstone that ran something like
this: "I was well; I thought to be better; I took
medicine, and here I lie."
Our Democratic friends have passed a tariff bill
that is approved so far as I can learn by only six
Democratic senators and nobody else. We
hear of the little coterie of senators whose
names I could not mention, perhaps, for they have
not been well identified, but their numbers has gen
erally been fixed at a round half dozen who de
cided what the tariff bill should be, and they are
pleased with it, and nobody else. Mr. Cleve
land has repudiated it, and has declared that it
involves "perfidy and dishonor;" that it was shame
ful in its character and in the influences that pro
duced it; that he would not even put his name to it.
IN PRESENTING MR. MCKINLEY '385
All of the leading Democratic papers in trie country
have condemned it both of the old stalwart variety
and of the mugwump variety. The Democratic chair
man of the ways and means committee has con
demned it, and the entire Democratic majority in the
House of Representatives. Now that is a great mis
fortune. It is a misfortune that the Democratic party
was not able to evolve a tariff bill that that party
would accept as a settlement of the tariff question.
But it is not accepted as a settlement.
In the very nature of things, a bill thus passed,
and thus characterized, can not be a settlement; and
already we have the proclamation from Mr.- Cleve
land, and from Mr. Wilson, that this is only the
beginning of the crusade against American indus
tries; that the war is to go on. Now that is a great
misfortune. If we could only prove by our Demo
cratic friends that we were in the bottom of the
well, dark and damp and dismal as it was, we would
have begun to look up and see whether we could
not find some star of hope; we would have begun
to anoint our bruises, and try to build some scaf
fold by which we might try to climb out. But we
are told that there are greater depths yet in store
for us. And so this country is to be held in a state
of suspense upon this question.
It can be ended in just one way, and that is by
overwhelming Republican victories in November.
[When New York gives Levi P. Morton 75,000 ma-
386 VIEWS OF AN EX-PRESIDENT
jority and Indiana her state ticket 25,000, and Illi
nois and those states that have wavered fall again
into line, and the next congress is Republican, there
will be an assurance that we have found the end of
this disastrous condition.
I think the Ohio Democrats the other day declared
that all these disasters of which we speak came upon
the country under the McKinley bill. Well, to be sure,
the McKinley bill was a law until that twenty-ninth
day was it of August, when the Gofman bill was
passed, but it was a law in restraint. It had been
arrested. We were listening from day to day to the
prophecies that in two weeks, or three, or four, it
would be repealed. It was not a law in the sense
that any merchant or manufacturer could act upon
it. It was dead in a business sense, though alive in
the statute. Why, sir, it would be just about as
reasonable to complain of a man who had been seized,
handcuffed and locked up in a cell for not support
ing his family as to complain of the McKinley bill
during this period of suspense. And then we are
told that under the McKinley bill the price of wool
went down under protective duty and since it has
been made free it is going up; that sugar on the
free list was higher than sugar with a forty per cent.
duty. All this notwithstanding the old doctrine that
the duty was always added to the cost of the domes
tic article.