the forefathers. I am not right sure that the forefathers would share this opinion if they were here, but that would be because of the fact that, notwithstanding the load of substantial virtues 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 competition about some dinner table gentlemen who have already had their speeches set up in the newspaper offices. They are brought to you as if they were fresh from the lip. they would have you believe to be "impromptu

You are served with what

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 to find somewhere some one unworked 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 boutonnière with tin-foil around it. You can see upon close inspection the

mark of the planer on his well-turned sentences. The competition with gentlemen who are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the impulse of the occasion. It is either incapacity 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 England 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 absolutely reliable newspaper press, there are some who

believe that there are wicked men who want to hitch the end of that chain on to another island farther 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 neighborhood 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 being 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 country; for even in the South, during times of slavery, educated men and women from New England were

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 character 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 GENTLEMENWhat I shall say to-day will be the unstudied tribute of a friend to the memory of a friend. My acquaintance with Governor Stanford was not long-a half score of years would cover it-but I saw him during 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 Leland 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 arrangement involved a meeting with Governor Stanford here at the scene of his greatest work. My coming is saddened by his absence. As I remarked the