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[Laughter.]

"They reckon ill who leave me out;
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, I pass, and deal again!'

Hang'd if he didn't go ahead, and do it, too! O, he was a cool one! Well, in about a minute, things were running pretty tight, but of a sudden I see by Mr. Emerson's eye that he judged he had 'em. He had already corralled two tricks, and each of the others one. So now he kind o' lifts a little in his chair, and says:

'I tire of globes and aces!

Too long the game is played!'

-and down he fetched a right bower. Mr. Longfellow smiles as sweet as pie, and says:—

'Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

For the lesson thou hast taught.'

-and dog my cats if he didn't down with another right bower! Well, sir, up jumps Holmes, a-war-whooping as usual, and says:

'God help them if the tempest swings
The pine against the palm!'

-and I wish I may go to grass if he didn't swoop down with another right bower! [Great laughter.] Emerson claps his hand on his bowie, Longfellow claps his on his revolver, and I went under a bunk. There was going to be trouble; but that monstrous Holmes rose up, wobbling his double chins, and says he: 'Order, gentlemen! The first man that draws, I'll lay down on him and smother him!' [Laughter.] All quiet on the Potomac, you bet you!

"They were pretty how-come-you-so now, and they begun to blow. Emerson says, 'The bulliest thing I ever wrote was "Barbara Frietchie."' Says Longfellow, 'It don't begin with my "Biglow Papers." Says Holmes, 'My "Thanatopsis" lays over 'em both.' [Laughter.] They mighty near ended in a fight. Then they wished they had some more company, and Mr. Emerson pointed at me and says:

[Laughter.]

'Is yonder squalid peasant all

That this proud nursery could breed?'

He was a-whetting his bowie on his boot-so I let it pass. [Laughter.] Well, sir, next they took it into their heads that they would like some

music; so they made me stand up and sing 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home', till I dropped-at thirteen minutes past four this morning. That's what I've been through, my friend. When I woke at seven they were leaving, thank goodness, and Mr. Longfellow had my only boots on, and his own under his arm. Says I, 'Hold on there, Evangeline, what you going to do with them?'" He says, 'Going to

make tracks with 'em, because—

'Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime;

[Laughter.]

And departing, leave behind us.
Footprints on the sands of time.'

"As I said, Mr. Twain, you are the fourth in twenty-four hours-and I'm going to move-I ain't suited to a littery atmosphere."

I said to the miner, "Why, my dear sir, these were not the gracious singers to whom we and the world pay loving reverence and homage; these were impostors."

The miner investigated me with a calm eye for a while, then said he, "Ah! impostors, were they? are you?" I did not pursue the subject; and since then I haven't traveled on my nom de plume enough to hurt.

Such was the reminiscence I was moved to contribute, Mr. Chairman. In my enthusiasm I may have exaggerated the details a little; but you will easily forgive me that fault, since I believe it is the first time I have ever deflected from perpendicular fact on an occasion like this. [Laughter and applause.]

§ 57

SMASHED CROCKERY

By St. Clair McKelway

(Speech before the National Society of China Importers, New York City, February 6, 1896.)

MR. CHAIRMAN AND FRIENDS: The china I buy abroad is marked "Fragile" in shipment. That which I buy at home is marked: "GlassThis Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The

ST. CLAIR MCKELLWAY. Born, Columbia, Mo., March 15, 1845; educated by private teachers; admitted to the New York bar, 1866, but never practiced law; journalist on the New York Tribune and the New York World; associate editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, 1870-1878; editor of The Albany Argus, 1878-1885; editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, 1885-1915; elected regent for life of the University of the State of New York. 1883; died, 1915.

American note of warning is fiction-with a moral motive. The common purpose of both is protection from freight fractors and baggage smashers. The European appeals to knowledge. The American addresses the imagination. The one expresses the truth. The other extends it. Neither is entirely successful. The skill and care of shippers cannot always victoriously cope with the innate destructiveness of fallen human nature. There is a great deal of smashed crockery in the world. You who are masters in the art of packing things and we whose vocation is the art of putting things, both have reason to know that no pains of placing or of preparation will guarantee freight or phrases, plates or propositions, china of any kind or principles of any sort, from the dangers of travel or from the tests of time. Your goods and our wares have to take their chances in their way across the seas, throughout the land and around the world. You lose some of yours merely in handling. The defects of firing cannot be always foreseen. The intrusion of inferior clay cannot be always prevented. The mere friction of contact may produce bad nicks. Nor is the fineness nor the excellence of the product an insurance against mishaps. From your factories or stores your output is at the mercy of carriers without compunction, and in our homes it is exposed to the heavy hands of servants without sentiment. The pleasure of many a dinner is impaired by the fear or the consciousness that inapt peasants are playing havoc with the treasures of art on which the courses are served.

If, however, the ceramic kingdom is strewn with smashed crockery, how much more so are the worlds of theology, medicine, politics, society, law, and the like. No finer piece of plate was ever put forth than the one inscribed: "I will believe only what I know." It was for years agreeable to the pride and vanity of the race. It made many a fool feel as if his forehead was lifted as high as the heavens, and that at every step he knocked out a star. When, however, the discovery was made that this assumption to displace deity amounted to a failure to comprehend nature, some disappointment was admitted. He who affected by searching to find out and to equal God could not explain the power by which a tree pumps its sap from roots to leaves, or why a baby rabbit rejects the grasses that would harm it, or why a puling infant divines its mother among the motley and multitudinous mass of sibilant saints at a sewing society which is discussing the last wedding and the next divorce. He "who admits only what he understands" would have to look on himself as a conundrum and then give the conundrum up. He would have the longest doubts and the shortest creed on record. Agnosticism is part of the smashed crockery of the moral universe.

Nor is the smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science. one and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and irrevocably recognized three schools of medicine and will recognize a fourth or a fifth as soon as it establishes itself by a sufficient number of cures or in a sufficient number of cemeteries. Medical intolerance cannot be legislated out of existence, but it has no further recognition in legislation. A common and considerable degree of general learning is by the State required of all intending students of medicine. An equal and extended degree of professional study is required. An identical measure of final examination with state certification and state licensure is required. The claim that men and women must die secundum artem in order to have any permit to live here or to live hereafter, has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery in the realm of therapeutics. The arrogant pretension that men must die secundum artem has been adjourned-sine die. And the State which prescribes uniform qualifications among the schools will yet require uniform consultations between them in the interest of the people whom they impartially prod and concurrently purge with diversity of methods, but with parity of price.

Other long impressive and long pretty plaques have also been incontinently smashed. One was lovingly lettered: "Once a Democrat, always a Democrat." Another was inscribed: "Unconditional Re

publicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an invariable partizan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish. It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines. Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought. No commission is needed to discover or to establish those lines. They have made their own route or course in human nature. The bondage from which men will free themselves is bondage to party organizations. Those organizations are combinations for power and spoils. They are feudal in their form, predatory in their spirit, military in their methods, but they necessarily bear no more relation to political principles than Italian banditti do to Italian unity, or the men who hold up railway trains do to the laws of transportation. Party slavery is a bad and disappearing form of smashed crockery.

The smashed crockery of society and of law could also be remarked. Our fathers' dictum, that it is the only duty of women to be charming, deserves to be sent into retirement. It is no more their duty to be

charming than it is the duty of the sun to light, or the rose to perfume, or the trees to cast a friendly shade. A function is not a duty. In the right sense of the word it is a nature or a habit. It is the property of women and it is their prerogative to be charming, but if they made it a duty, the effort would fail, for the intention would be apparent and the end would impeach the means. Indeed, the whole theory of the eighteenth century about women has gone to the limbo of smashed crockery. It has been found that education does not hurt her. It has been discovered that learning strengthens her like a tonic and becomes. her like a decoration. It has been discovered that she can compete with men in the domain of lighter labor, in several of the professions, and in not a few of the useful arts. The impression of her as a pawn, a property or a plaything, came down from paganism to Christianity and was too long retained by the Christian world. There is even danger of excess in the liberality now extended to her. The toast, "Woman, Once Our Superior and Now Our Equal," is not without satire as well as significance. There must be a measurable reaction against the ultra tendency in progress which has evolved the New Woman, as the phrase is. I never met one and I hope I never shall. The women of the present, the girls of the period, the sex up-to-date, will more than suffice to double our joys and to treble our expenses. The new fads, as well as the old fallacies, can be thrown among the smashed crockery of demolished and discarded misconceptions.

I intended to say much about the smashed crockery of the lawyers. I intended to touch upon the exploded claim that clients are their slaves, witnesses theirs for vivisection, courts their playthings, and juries their dupes. More mummery has thrived in law than in even medicine or theology. The disenchanting and discriminating tendency of a realistic age has, however, somewhat reformed the bar. Fluency, without force, is discounted in our courts. The merely smart practitioner finds his measure quickly taken and that the conscientious members of his calling hold him at arm's length. Judges are learning that they are not rated wise when they are obscure, or profound when they are stupid, or mysterious when they are reserved. Publicity is abating many of the abuses both of the bench and the bar. It will before long, even in this judicial department, require both rich and poor to stand equal before the bar of justice. The conjugal complications of plutocrats will not be sealed up from general view by sycophantic magistrates, while the matrimonial infelicities of the less well-to-do are spread broad on the records. The still continuing scandals of partitioning refereeships among the family relatives of judges will soon be stopped and the shame and scandal of damage suits or of libel suits, without cause, maintained by

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