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ABBOTT LAWRENCE.

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:

I HAVE come a considerable distance this morning, (from Newport,) at the request of the committee having charge of the arrangements for this meeting, with scarce any preparation to address you but what consists in a most heartfelt participation in the feeling which calls you together. I come to tell you that already, at a distance from home, the news of Mr. Lawrence's decease excites the same deep sympathy as here. With ample opportunities to witness the great and excellent qualities which made him so respected and valued a member of the community, acting with him confidentially on many important occasions, public and private, I need scarcely add that I have cherished for him feelings of the warmest personal regard, the fruit of a friendly intercourse, commencing with my entrance upon life and continued without a moment's interruption or chill, to the close of his. He was, sir, but one or two years my senior, and I should be wanting in common sensibility if, on this occasion, I did not associate with that sorrowful regret, which is common to us all, the more solemn reflection, that, having walked side by side with him for forty years, having accompanied him to the brink of the "narrow sea" which "divides that happy land from ours,”—in a few years only at most, in the course of nature, that narrow sea will cease to divide us.

It would be an unseasonable and superfluous, though a

* Remarks made at a public meeting of the citizens of Boston, in Faneuil Hall, on the 20th of August, 1855, on occasion of the decease of the Hon. Abbott Lawrence.

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grateful task, before this assembly,-composed of the neighbors, the associates, the fellow-citizens of our deceased friend, to attempt minutely to relate his career or delineate his character. You are acquainted with them from personal observation, and they have already gone forth, on the wings of the press, to the four quarters of the land. You have been accustomed to hold them up and to speak of them as a most happy specimen of the life and qualities, which, without early advantages over the rest of the community, are naturally produced by that equality of condition which prevails in New England, and by those means of common school education, and the facilities which among us attend a virtuous, energetic and industrious young man upon his entrance on the world. You habitually point to him, as a bright example of the highest social position, of commanding influence over others, of overflowing abundance of this world's goods, attained by the calm and steady exercise of homebred virtues and practical qualities, by the energetic and unostentatious pursuit of an industrious career, which are the common birthright of the country; and the greater his praise, who out of these familiar elements of prosperity was able to rear such a rare and noble fabric of success.

Mr. Lawrence, sir, as you well know, belonged to that class of merchants, who raise commerce far above the level of the selfish pursuit of private gain. He contemplated it as a great calling of humanity, having high duties and generous. aims; one of the noblest developments of our modern civilization. I know these were his views. I had a conversation with him many years ago, which I shall never forget. I was to deliver an address before one of our young men's associations, and I went to him and asked him what I should say to the young men. "Tell them," said he, "that commerce is not a mercenary pursuit, but an honorable calling. Tell them that the hand of God has spread out these mighty oceans, not to separate but to unite the families of men; and that the various climates of the earth and their different products are designed by Providence to be the foundation of a mutually beneficial intercourse between distant regions."

Mr. Lawrence was justly proud of the character of a Boston merchant, and that character suffered nothing at his hands. His business life extended over two or three of those terrible convulsions, which shake the pillars of the commercial world, but they disturbed in no degree the solid foundations of his prosperity. He built upon the adamantine basis of Probity; beyond reproach, beyond suspicion. His life gave a lofty meaning to the familiar line, and you felt, in his presence, that

"An honest man is the noblest work of God."

Far from being ashamed of his humble beginnings, he was proud of them, as the merchant princes of Florence, at the height of their power and when they were giving the law to Italy, preserved upon their houses the cranes by which bales of merchandise were raised to their attics. A young gentleman told me yesterday at Newport, that two or three months ago, Mr. Lawrence took from his waistcoat pocket and exhibited in his presence, a pair of blunt scissors, which had served him for daily use at the humble commencement of his business life. As for his personal integrity, Mr. Chairman, to which you alluded, I am persuaded that if the dome of the State house, which towers over his residence in Park street, had been coined into a diamond, and laid at his feet, as the bribe of a dishonest transaction, he would have spurned it like the dust he trod on. His promise was a sacrament.

Although in early life brought up in a limited sphere, and in the strictness of the old school, which prescribed a somewhat rigid perseverance in one track, Mr. Lawrence was not afraid of bold and novel projects; he rather liked them. He was an early and an efficient friend of the two great business conceptions, creations I may call them, of his day and generation. As much as any one man, more than most, he contributed to realize them, to the inappreciable benefit of the country. When he came forward into life, India cottons, of a coarser and flimsier texture than any thing that has ever been seen in this country by any man under thirty-five years of age, were sold in this market at retail for a quarter of a

dollar a yard. Every attempt to manufacture a better article was crushed by foreign competition, acting upon imperfect machinery, want of skill incident to a novel enterprise, and the reluctance of capital to seek new and experimental investments. Mr. Lawrence felt that this was an unnatural state of things. He believed, if our infant arts could be sustained through the first difficulties, that they would assuredly prosper. He believed the American Union to be eminently calculated for a comprehensive manufacturing system. He saw, in no distant perspective, the great agricultural staple of the South enjoying the advantage of a second and that a home market, by being brought into connection with the mechanical skill and the capital of the North. He saw the vast benefit of multiplying the pursuits of a community, and thus giving play to the infinite variety of native talent. He heard in advance the voice of a hundred streams, now running to waste over barren rocks, but destined hereafter to be brought into accord with the music of the water-wheel and the powerloom. He contemplated a home consumption at the farmer's door, for the products of his corn field, his vegetable garden, and his dairy. These were the views and the principles which led Mr. Lawrence in conjunction with Mr. Jackson, Mr. Francis C. Lowell, Mr. Appleton, and their enlightened associates, to labor for the establishment of the manufactures of the United States. These surely were large and generous views. At the time when his own pursuits and interests were deeply engaged in commerce, entertaining the opinions I have so briefly indicated, he threw himself with characteristic ardor into the new pursuit, and the country is largely indebted to Mr. Lawrence for the noble result. We are now, without any diminution of our agriculture and navigation, but on the contrary with a large increase of both, the second manufacturing country in the world. The rising city which bears his name, on the beautiful banks of the Merrimack, will carry down to posterity no unworthy memorial of his participation in this auspicious work.

The other great conception, or creation, to which I had reference, is the railroad system of the country. For this

also the community is largely indebted to Mr. Lawrence. With respect to the first considerable work of this kind in New England, the Worcester Railroad, I cannot speak with so much confidence of Mr. Lawrence's connection with it, as my friend behind me (Hon. N. Hale); but with regard to the extension of that road westward, I am able to speak from my own information. Mr. Lawrence was one of its earliest and most efficient friends. It is twenty years ago this summer since we had a most enthusiastic and successful meeting in this hall in furtherance of that great enterprise. Mr. Lawrence contributed efficiently to get up the meeting, and took a very active part in the measures proposed by it. It was my fortune to take some part in the proceedings. At the end of my speech, for which he had furnished me valuable materials and suggestions, he said to me, with that beaming smile which we all remember so well," Mr. Everett, we shall live to see the banks of the Upper Mississippi connected by iron bands with State street." He has passed away too soon for all but his own pure fame; but he lived to see that prophecy fulfilled. I need not tell you, Mr. Chairman, that to these two causes, the manufactures and the net of railroads thrown over the country, New England is greatly indebted for her present prosperity.

There is another cause to which she owes still more, than to any thing that begins and ends in material influences the cause of education. Of this, also, Mr. Lawrence was an efficient friend. Besides all that he did for the academies and schools of the country, in answer to applications for aid continually made, and as constantly granted in proportion to their merits, he has left that enduring monument of his enlightened liberality, the Scientific School at Cambridge. My friend and former associate in the corporation of Harvard College (Hon. S. A. Eliot) can vouch for the accuracy of what I say on this head. Mr. Lawrence felt that our collegiate seminaries, from the nature of those institutions, made but inadequate provision for scientific education as a preparation for the industrial career. He determined, as far as possible, to remedy the defect. He had felt himself the want of

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