Thomas B. Reed

[Speech of St. Clair McKelway 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: "Glass—This Side Up With Care." The foreign word of caution is fact. The 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 Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an invariable partisan 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 procured and false testimony and conducted on sheer speculation, will be brought to an end. The law is full of rare crockery, but it is also replete with crockery that ought to be smashed. Much bad crockery in it has been smashed and much more will be, if necessary, by the press, which is itself not without considerable ceramic material that could be pulverized with signal benefit to the public and to the fourth estate.

But why am I talking about smashed crockery when I am told that it is the very life of your trade? Were crockery imperishable this would be the last dinner of your association. Your members would be eating cold victuals at area doors, passed to you on the plates you have made, by the domestics whose free and easy carelessness is really the foundation of your fortunes. You want crockery to be smashed, because the more smash the more crockery and the more crockery the more output, and the more output the more revenue, and the more revenue the more Waldorf dinners, and the more Waldorf dinners the more opportunity for you to make the men of other callings stand and deliver those speeches, which I like to hear, and in the hope of hearing which I now give way.

TRIBUTE TO MARK TWAIN

Mr. President and Friends:—Years ago we here sought to hold up Mark Twain's hands. Now we all feel like holding up our own, in congratulation of him and of ourselves. Of him because his warfare is accomplished. Of ourselves because he has returned to our company. If it was a pleasure to know him then, it is a privilege and an honor to know him now. He has fought the good fight. He has kept the faith. He is ready to be offered up, but we are not ready to have him offered up. For we want the Indian summer of his life to be long, and that to be followed by a genial winter, which, if it be as frosty as his hair, shall also be as kindly as his heart. [Applause.]

He has enough excess and versatility of ability to be a genius. He has enough quality and quantity of virtues to be a saint. But he has honorably transmuted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm fellowship to cold perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are content to wait for him. May they wait long. [Applause.]

I think he is entitled to be regarded as the Dean of America's humor; that he is entitled to the distinction of being the greatest humorist this nation ever had. I say this with a fair knowledge of the chiefs of the entire corps, from Francis Hopkinson and the author of "Hasty Pudding," down to Bill Nye and Dooley. None of them would I depreciate. I would greatly prefer to honor and hail them all for the singular fittedness of their gifts to the needs of the nation in their times. Hopkinson and Joel Barlow lightened the woes of the Revolution by the touch of nature that makes the whole world grin. Seba Smith relieved the Yankee sense of tension under the impact of Jacksonian roughness, by tickling its ribs with a quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of alkali journalism and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the attention of the world. Bill Nye singed the shams of his day, and Dooley dissects for Hinnissey the shams of our own. Nor should we forget Eugene Field, the beatifier of childhood; or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulist of the plantation; or Ruth McEnery Stuart, the coronal singer of the joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of God in ebony in the old South, ere it leaped and hardened to the new.

To these, love and honor. But to this man honor's crown of honor, for he has made a mark none of the others has reached. Few of them have diversified the delights to be drawn from their pages of humor. They have, as humorists, in distinction to the work of moralists, novelists, orators and poets, in which the rarest among them shine, they have as humorists, in the main, worked a single vein. And some of them were humorists for a purpose, a dreary grind that, and some of them were only humorists for a period as well as for a purpose. The purpose served, the period passed, the humor that was of their life a thing apart, ceased. 'Tis Clemens' whole existence! [Applause.]

As Bacon made all learning his province, so Mark Twain has made all life and history his quarry, from the Jumping Frog to the Yankee at Arthur's Court; from the inquested petrifaction that died of protracted exposure to the present parliament of Austria; from the Grave of Adam to the mysteries of the Adamless Eden known as the league of professional women; from Mulberry Sellers to Joan of Arc, and from Edward the Sixth to Puddin'head Wilson, who wanted to kill his half of the deathless dog.

Nevada is forgiven its decay because he flashed the oddities of its zenith life on pages that endure. California is worth more than its gold, because he showed to men the heart under its swagger. He annexed the Sandwich Islands to the fun of the nation long before they were put under its flag. Because of him the Missouri and the Mississippi go not unvexed to the sea, for they ripple with laughter as they recall Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, poor Jim, and the Duke. Europe, Asia Minor, and Palestine are open doors to the world, thanks to this Pilgrim's Progress with his "Innocents Abroad." Purity, piety and pity shine out from "Prince and Pauper" like the eyes of a wondering deer on a torch-lighted night from a wooded fringe of mountain and of lake.

But enough of what I fear is already too much. In expressing my debt to him, I hope I express somewhat at least of yours. I cannot repay him in kind any more than I could rival him. None of us can. But we can render to him a return he would like. With him we can get our way to reality, and burn off pretence as acid eats its way to the denuded plate of the engraver. We can strip the veneer of convention from style, and strengthen our thought in his Anglo-Saxon well of English undefiled. We can drop seeming for sincerity. We can be relentless toward hypocrisy and tender to humanity. We can rejoice in the love of laughter, without ever once letting it lead us to libertinism of fancy. We can reach through humor the heart of man. We can make exaggeration the scourge of meanness and the magnifier of truth on the broad screen of life. By study of him, the nothing new under the sun can be made fresh and fragrant by the supreme art of putting things. Though none of us can handle his wand, all of us can be transformed by it into something different from and finer than our dull selves. That is our delight, that is our debt, both due to him, and long may he remain with us to brighten, to broaden and to better our souls with the magic mirth and with the mirthful magic of his incomparable spell. [Applause.]

Photo-engraving in colors after an original painting by George W. Maynard

This is from a series of eight panels, representing "The Virtues"—Fortitude, Justice, Patriotism, Courage, Temperance, Prudence, Industry, and Concord. Each figure is about five and a half feet high clad in drapery, and standing out on a solid red background. The style is Pompeiian, the general tone is some what like marble, but relieved by a touch of color. "Patriotism" is represented as feeding an eagle, the emblem of America, from a golden bowl, symbolizing the nourishment given by this Virtue to the spirit of the nation.