language as "contemptibly unpatriotic," as "cowardly admission," towards his nine colleagues on the committee, they can bear it better than he can afford to use it. They can do this all the more cheerfully, if not proudly, because of the wanton and unpardonable fling he makes at the President of the United States, to speak of whom in connection with cowardice or timidity or as "contemptibly unpatriotic" is to arouse all good citizens to derision, if not indignation. Whatever partisan hatred may lead men to say of the President, no one until now has ever pretended even to doubt his Jacksonian courage, and but few indeed ever dared to deny his undoubted love of country.

Why this miserable fling at the President in advance? He is a part of the lawmaking power and the chief of a co-ordinate branch of our Government.

Perhaps the gentleman did not "love (the claims) less, but he loved (to abuse and denounce) the President more." Whatever may have been his motive (and I care not what it was), I tell the gentleman his language was not appropriate to his own high position, nor in harmony with the calm and dispassionate judgment of the people of our whole country, nor of that of his own State of Massachusetts, nor was it justified by the facts.

Mr. Chairman, in this extreme heat, it is some relief to observe the coolness with which gentlemen assume to be wiser, better, and more honest than the great statesmen and patriots of the Republic who laid its foundations in the integrity of the people. They--all who were charged with the administration of the Government since 1792-are presented to our country to-day as dishonest delayers of the payment of just debts and with allowing their government and ours to rob these claimants and those who were contemporaneous with all the facts and circumstances bearing upon the rights and duties of the Government to its citizens, including Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, are set down as either knowing less than ourselves of matters within their sworn keeping and protection or as lacking fidelity and integrity in the administration of the General Government.

I do not envy that man who is so organized as to be able for a moment to indulge in the assumption that all the honesty, all the truth, all the devotion to the payment of just debts, together with wisdom so vastly superior to that of the authors of our independence, the framers of our Constitution, and the immortal defenders of liberty throughout the world, have been reserved for members of the 50th Congress of the United States. He is deluded. His vanity has paralyzed his judgment. and discretion, and the just fame of our honored forefathers cannot be thus disturbed.

SPEECH OF WELCOME TO THE PRESS ASSOCIATION OF MISSOURI, IN TOOTLE'S OPERA HOUSE,

ST. JOSEPH, MAY 10TH, 1882.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press Association of Missouri:

It is ever a most pleasing duty to speak the unanimous voice. The fifty thousand inhabitants of our twenty square miles of municipal territory authorize me in their names to bid you a hearty welcome to the city of St. Joseph. The representatives of the city government and our able and indefatigable board of trade, whose special guests you are, give official sanction to the hospitable emotions of every individual heart.

St. Joseph takes pride and enjoys a real pleasure in receiving even an ordinary guest. How happy we are, therefore, to-day in receiving and entertaining so many hundreds of the useful, thoughtful, and honored representative men and women of Missouri is suitably expressed by the emotional Psalmist in whispered cadence, "Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills rejoice together."

St. Joseph expects me to tender to you the broadest possible hospitality unconnected with any unsavory dish of idle compliment or undignified flattery. I regard it as no departure from this public expectation to say that St. Joseph receives you with profound respect for your useful and noble profession, with great personal esteem for your individual characters, and with undissembled gratitude for your constant and faithful public work for the success and advancement of everything that you believe to be good and true and pure.

Devoted like others to the private duties and labors of life, you are yet away beyond them, and beyond us all, in systematic, continuous, and efficient labor for the highest good of our common country and the elevation of mankind. You are educators in the best sense of the term, for you are constantly acting upon and moulding human thought and expression and giving tone and strength to moral convictions that govern human action. You are continually destroying the fallacies, fancies, and hobbies of men by argument, ridicule, sarcasm, wit, wisdom, and humor, all of which are honorable weapons in your intellectual warfare. If they ever kill they also "make alive." With " malice toward none and charity for all," you sometimes wound and bruise and blister, but only to heal and cure and elevate. Mightier, indeed, than the sword, your pen strikes blows that lift the oppressed from beneath the oppressor's heel, revive the faint and weary-burdened, and deliver the guiltless from bonds. With knightly honor you champion the cause of virtue and innocence and dash headlong to destruction any monster who dares to assail it. The poor wisely lean upon you for safety and protection, and the rich have better titles through your defense and support than in records that public opinion alone can make or sustain. The suffering and the sick rely upon you with

confidence for sympathy and solace, and the last best public words for the dead you are expected to utter. The messenger of the last proclamation on earth, coming somewhat after the fashion of a newspaper man, may regard your present modes and means of circulating news as limited or insignificant, but the good works and manifold sacrifices of newspaper men for humanity's sake may well cause the grand old Archangel to open wide the door of your reception to an eternity of entertainments and hospitalities where there are neither wrongs to be redressed nor copy to be prepared.

Representatives of the press, you are also citizens and representatives of Missouri-our grand and glorious State. Your love for Missouri is a vindication of her good name from every aspersion. Neither demagogues nor the agencies of adverse interests can successfully malign her or drive us to a defense she does not need. Needing neither defense nor eulogy, Missouri rests upon her record and resources, and the honor and devotion of her sons and the purity and loveliness of her daughters.

Mr. President, the Association and yourself will pardon me if I detain you for a few moments with words or thoughts descriptive of St. Joseph and her people, to whom I shall soon beg your leave to present you. That they may be at once defended from any suspicion of the immodesty of self-praise, I take occasion to say that, residing outside the city limits, I feel justified in speaking freely of those residing within them.

Fronting six miles on yon noble but turbulent river and extending eastward with beautiful and fabled elevations for an average distance of over three miles, St. Joseph can in truth enumerate an actual permanent population of fifty thousand souls.

This beautiful temple of art, dedicated to Thespis, and now filled with your hosts and Cicerones, the beautiful women and gallant gentlemen of St. Joseph, is at once a monument of the public spirit of one of our first citizens and a sample of the broad and liberal enterprise of all.

When you go from this place to the homes of the citizens you will find that judgment, taste, culture, and skilled architects united in planning and erecting their residences, whether those of the merchant princes or the skilled mechanics, the professional men or the thrifty sons of manual labor. In no single instance will you find the pitiful ostentatiousness of uncultured wealth, the desire of mere display, or the sacrifice of neatness or modesty to vulgar show. Within each you will find

home, always the dearest place on earth, when loved and prized as it ought to be. Everywhere health, cleanliness, convenience, comfort, and good cheer. Add to these lovable, pretty children and a hospitality that reminds you of your first mother, and there is not a domicile in St. Joseph where you can fail to find enjoyment and happiness.

In the mercantile houses of St. Joseph, wholesale and retail, you will find every known fabric on the earth. In charge are men who have made for St. Joseph a name that is everywhere a synonym for integrity and honor, and who have built up. an established trade and commerce that exceed, as I am informed, the combined jobbing trade of every city on the Missouri river from St. Charles to Sioux City.

If you will carefully visit all the manufacturing establishments and workshops of St. Joseph you will find nearly every known industry represented, although many are yet in their infancy. As a whole they are extended and imposing, and indicate a period in the near future when St. Joseph will be the undoubted center of manufacturing industries west of the Mississippi river.

In this State, where everything that enters into the cost of manufacturing is abundant and cheap, manufactories ought to abound and manufacturers ought to be multiplied. Every city and town represented here to-day could beneficially and profitably maintain a large number of manufactories, and if you, gentlemen of the press, will carry to your homes a full knowledge of what St. Joseph has done and is still doing in this direction it will be but a short time until the whole State will feel the benefit and blessing of your present visit to her great manufacturing center, St. Joseph.

Closely allied to these manufacturing and commercial interests, the railroads of St. Joseph are performing great and generous work for the prosperity and progress of the city. Reaching out in every direction to carry away the vast supplies needed in North Missouri and the States and Territories north, south, and west of us, they bring back the products of those States and Territories for sale, consumption, and manufacture. The volume or extent of the railroad business of St. Joseph, the facilities for doing it, and the number of men actually employed in the various departments will interest and astonish you, and as our chairman of the committee of arrangements, Colonel Dawes, is himself one of the best posted railroad men of the State and, distinguished alike for his courtesy and his hospitality, he will doubtless be happy to receive and conduct you through the offices and shops of the great line he represents. These will give you a very fair idea of the business and works

of the other lines. St. Joseph's grand and truly magnificent union depot, larger and grander than the splendid union depot in St. Louis, stands almost an animate, speaking monument to the enterprise of our people, and especially of our board of trade. The celebration of the completion of this great structure was postponed, in your honor, until this day, so that each and every one of you may feel a personal, individual interest in the most magnificent and beautiful passenger depot in the valley of the Mississippi. Much of the success of this great public work is due to a modest but able attorney of this city, Mr. Judson, whose enterprise and public spirit, a careful study of Blackstone, Coke, and Kent, and the labor of a large and successful practice can neither chill nor destroy. He will open wide for your entertainment every door in the grand structure.

In many respects the people of St. Joseph are great, especially in those things that are useful and practical. It was practical men of St. Joseph in the St. LouisMississippi River Convention who laid the foundation of the Missouri River Convention and led up from the begging of cowardly pittances for the improvement of our great river to an appropriation bill therefor of one million dollars, and the just and patriotic utterances of the able President of the United States favorable to the appropriation of all that may be needed. We do not overleap partisan prejudices to thank him; we just simply choke them to death. An interest so vast makes us all

If you had dropped in on us only a month ago you would have thought the people of St. Joseph great, even in local differences and contests. The storm then raging betokened to the casual observer no such goodly day as this. The doom of Sodom was the doom of the city, whichever of the warring hosts succeeded; but, as in all such cases, the storm subsided. The municipal ark rested safely on our own Ararat, and a delivered people came forth with righteous acclaim—for have we not read vox populi vox Dei?

When, in the fullness of time, the most noted bandit of the country had to fall and die, where else in all this broad land than upon yon high and beautiful slope, once a promontory of the great river, could he have fallen, unless he had fallen sooner, with greater advantage to his State and country. Old age and gout might have carried him to his grave forty years hence, with all his crimes increased by annual multiplication, had he not ventured to take up a residence in St. Joseph, where "the way of the transgressor is hard" indeed, and his punishment sure and certain.

The great iron bridge that connects Missouri with the temperate zone across the Missouri river and firmly anchors St. Joseph at the foot of the Rocky Mountains will carry you freely and safely over into the somewhat exclusive realm of a modern saint, where the wicked (traffickers in wine) cease from troubling, and the weary (sons of Bacchus) are at rest.

Mr. President, we trust you will look over and examine our several long lines of street railways, all under successful management. Go to our pork and beef packing-houses, where all the year round the work goes on-as well in summer as in winter. Visit the stock-yards, grain elevators, and public and private warehouses, and see the extent of St. Joseph's facilities for handling the vast products of the vast country tributary thereto. Go down, not quite to the center of the earth, into our cellars, where are stored the cooling product of our rye and barley, superior to any manufactured in Milwaukee or Cincinnati. Once there, "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall," resist the courteous hospitality of the gentlemanly proprietors if you can.

The public schools of St. Joseph are the especial pride of the city. Their doors will open at your approach, and an able president, a faithful board of directors, a superintendent and teachers of great worth and culture will take delight in showing you respect and honor. It is the sincere belief that these schools are not excelled anywhere in the United States.

The numerous churches of St. Joseph, representing all denominations of Christians and causing the Gospel of Peace to be proclaimed in many foreign languages as well as our own, will command your attention as they do your confidence and

respect.

There are two other public works of which some mention, should be made. I allude to the grape-sugar refinery and the water works. The first, like everything else in St. Joseph, is on a broad and liberal scale. Nearly two thousand bushels of corn are daily consumed, and the sugar and syrup product, with reputations for superiority already widely established, are so eagerly sought for in the markets of the country that the demand is far beyond the immense supply. The