the business of sitting in the Senate and listening to the discussions in that body. We may assume that he proposes that the ex-Presidents shall share the burden of the Vice-President as he listens to the soliloquies which the various members of that body pour into "The Congressional Record," while the remainder of the Senators are engaged in more entertaining and less somnolent occupation.

The ex-Presidents are to have seats in the Senate and join in the discussion, but not to vote. Why Mr. Bryan should think it necessary to add to the discussion in the Senate the lucubrations of ex-Presidents, I am at a loss to say. I cannot conceive of any reform in the Senate which does not lead to a limit in their debate.

For many reasons, I object to Mr. Bryan's disposition of ex-Presidents. If I must go and disappear into oblivion, I prefer to go by the chloroform or lotos method. It is pleasanter and it's less drawn out.

But, my friends, I have occupied your time too long in my cursory remarks, the subject of which at times may have seemed too sober and grave for lotos eaters, but as the office of the Presidency is still in my keeping, and as the thought of parting with it is perhaps the most prominent one that figures in my mind, I have ventured to discuss it in accents both grave and gay. I wish to express deep gratitude to you for the honor which you have done me in making me your guest tonight, and I close with a sentiment and a toast to which I most sincerely and cordially ask your unanimous acclaim:

"Health and success to the able, distinguished and patriotic gentleman who is to be the next President of the United States."

§ 51

SPEECH AT BAR DINNER

By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

(Speech of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a banquet in his honor given by the Suffolk Bar Association, Boston, March 7, 1900, upon his elevation to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.)

GENTLEMEN OF THE SUFFOLK BAR: The kindness of this reception almost unmans me, and it shakes me the more when taken with a kind

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. Born Boston, Mass., March 8, 1841; graduated from Harvard in 1861; LL.B., in 1866; served three years as a soldier in the Civil War; admitted to the bar in 1867; Instructor in Law, Harvard College, 1870-71; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, 1882; Associate Justice of Supreme Judicial Court at Massachusetts, 1882-1899; Chief Justice, 1889-92; Associate Justice Supreme Court of United States since December 4, 1902.

of seriousness which the moment has for me. As with a drowning man, the past is telescoped into a minute, and the stages are all here at once in my mind. The day before yesterday I was at the law school, fresh from the army, arguing cases in a little club with Goulding and Beaman and Peter Olney, and laying the dust of pleading by certain sprinklings which Huntington Jackson, another ex-soldier, and I managed to contrive together. A little later in the day, in Bob Morse's, I saw a real writ, acquired a practical conviction of the difference between assumpsit and trover, and marveled open-mouthed at the swift certainty with which a master of his business turned it off.

Yesterday I was at the law school again, in the chair instead of on the benches, when my dear partner, Shattuck, came out and told me that in one hour the Governor would submit my name to the council for a judgeship, if notified of my assent. It was a stroke of lightning which changed the whole course of my life.

And the day before yesterday, gentlemen, was thirty-five years, and yesterday was more than eighteen years, ago. I have gone on feeling young, but I have noticed that I have met fewer of the old to whom to show my deference, and recently I was startled by being told that ours is an old bench. Well, I accept the fact, although I find it hard to realize, and I ask myself, what is there to show for this half lifetime that has passed? I look into my book in which I keep a docket of the decisions of the full court which fall to me to write, and find about a thousand cases. A thousand cases, many of them upon trifling or transitory matters, to represent nearly half a lifetime! A thousand cases, when one would have liked to study to the bottom and to say his say on every question which the law ever has presented, and then to go on and invent new problems which should be the test of doctrine, and then to generalize it all and write it in continuous, logical, philosophic exposition, setting forth the whole corpus with its roots in history and its justifications of expedience, real or supposed!

Alas, gentlemen, that is life. I often imagine Shakespeare or Napoleon summing himself up and thinking: "Yes, I have written five thousand lines of solid gold, and a good deal of padding-I, who have covered the milky way with words which outshine the stars!" "Yes, I beat the Austrians in Italy and elsewhere; I made a few brilliant campaigns, and I ended in middle life in a cul-de-sac-I who had dreamed of a world monarchy and of Asiatic power!" We cannot live in our dreams. We are lucky enough if we can give a sample of our best, and if in our hearts we can feel that it has been nobly done.

Some changes come about in the process; changes not necessarily so much in the nature as in the emphasis of our interest.

I do not

mean in our wish to make a living and to succeed-of course, we all want those things-but I mean in our ulterior intellectual or spiritual interests, in the ideal part, without which we are but snails or tigers.

One begins with a search for a general point of view. After a time he finds one, and then for a while he is absorbed in testing it, in trying to satisfy himself whether it is true. But after many experiments or investigations, all have come out one way, and his theory is confirmed and settled in his mind; he knows in advance that the next case will be but another verification, and the stimulus of anxious curiosity is gone. He realizes that his branch of knowledge only presents more illustrations of the universal principle; he sees it all as another case of the same old ennui, or the same sublime mystery-for it does not matter what epithets you apply to the whole of things, they are merely judgments of yourself. At this stage the pleasure is no less, perhaps, but it is the pure pleasure of doing the work, irrespective of further aims, and when you reach that stage you reach, as it seems to me, the triune formula of the joy, the duty and the end of life.

It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this. The hell of the old world's literature is to be taxed beyond one's powers. This country has expressed in story-I suppose because it has experienced it in life-a deeper abyss of intellectual asphyxia or vital ennui, when powers conscious of themselves are denied their chance.

The rule of joy and the law of duty seem to me all one. I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think "Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might," infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing, you must have all your will in a focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and, equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.

The joy, the duty, and, I venture to add, the end of life. I speak only of this world, of course, and of the teachings of this world. I do not seek to trench upon the province of spiritual guides. But from the point of view of the world the end of life is life. Life is action, the use of one's powers. As to use them to their height is our joy and duty, so it is the one end that justifies itself. Until lately the best thing

that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief work of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoördinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it. I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, subconscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers. In the words of a touching negro song: "sometimes I's up, sometimes I's down, sometimes I's almost to the groun'," but these thoughts have carried me, as I hope they will carry the young men who hear me, through long years of doubt, self-distrust and solitude. They do now, for, although it might seem that the day of trial was over, in fact it is renewed each day. The kindness which you have shown me makes me bold in happy moments to believe that the long and passionate struggle has not been quite in vain. (Applause.)

§ 52

THE PURITAN AND THE CAVALIER

By Henry Watterson

(Speech at the eighty-ninth anniversary banquet of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1894.)

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: Eight years ago, to-night, there stood where I am standing now a young Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the "significance" of his presence here-"the first Southerner to speak at this board"-a circumstance, let me add, not very

HENRY WATTERSON. Born in Washington, D. C., February 16, 1840; educated principally by private tutors; staff officer Confederate Army during the Civil War; editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, 1868-1919; member of Congress, 1876-1877.

creditable to any of us-and in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall, appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.

He was my disciple, my protégé, my friend. He came to me from the Southern schools, where he had perused the arts of oratory and letters, to get a few hints in journalism, as he said; needing so few, indeed, that, but a little later, I sent him to one of the foremost journalists of this foremost city, bearing a letter of introduction, which described him as "the greatest boy ever born in Dixie, or anywhere else."

He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good-will to men, and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the dove from the ark.

I mean to take up the word where Grady left it off, but I shall continue the sentence with a somewhat larger confidence, and, perhaps, with a somewhat fuller meaning; because, notwithstanding the Puritan trappings, traditions, and associations which surround me-visible illus trations of the self-denying fortitude of the Puritan character and the somber simplicity of the Puritan taste and habit-I never felt less out of place in all my life.

To tell you the truth, I am afraid that I have gained access here on false pretenses; for I am no Cavalier at all; just plain Scotch-Irish; one of those Scotch-Irish Southerners who ate no fire in the green leaf and has eaten no dirt in the brown, and who, accepting, for the moment, the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once sought to ascribe to them-descriptive labels at once classifying and separating North and South-verbal redoubts along that mythical line called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists of other days to be no bridges-I am much disposed to say, "A plague o' both your houses!"

Each was good enough and bad enough in its way, whilst they lasted; each in its turn filled the English-speaking world with mourning; and each, if either could have resisted the infection of the soil and climate they found here, would be to-day striving at the sword's point to square life by the iron rule of Theocracy, or to round it by the dizzy whirl of a petticoat! It is very pretty to read about the Maypole in Virginia and very edifying and inspiring to celebrate the deeds of the Pilgrim Fathers. But there is not Cavalier blood enough left in the Old Dominion to produce a single crop of first families, whilst out in Nebraska and Iowa they claim that they have so stripped New England of her Puritan stock as to spare her hardly enough for farm hands. This