At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:

“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”

“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the table.

It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance and range.

It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was nothing wanting, except the million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up.”

And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's son—a miserable friar of a country town—was prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.

“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend you—you, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then—where will you be then?”

“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.”

Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man—one of the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the earth for their inheritance."

It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,” said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know, madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”

And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly' is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department go!” If one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give the palm to a woman—a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'”

It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on the world's stage.

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