as General Schenck understands it in Congress, and as General Grant understands it on the field of battle: I mean to say that we understand it at the mouth of the cannon. (Renewed and great applause.)

A vote of thanks was unanimously passed to the speaker; and further, that his address should be printed at the expense of the Club. The meeting then adjourned.

The New York Tribune, of December 15th, gives the following account of the proceedings of that session of the New York Union League Club:

"Last evening, the regular monthly meeting of the Union League Club was held at their rooms in East Seventeenth Street, Charles Butler, Esq., presiding.

After the transaction of business, Mr. P. McD. Collins was introduced, and delivered the same lecture which he read before the Travelers' Club on the 8th of November.

Señor Don Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, Special Envoy from Chili, was then introduced, who spoke as follows:

GENTLEMEN-After hearing such an eloquent lecture, on a subject so interesting to the world, and by a man so superior in intelligence, I think I am justified in saying that your kindness in calling on me to speak amounts almost to cruelty.

But as Mr. Collins has mentioned in his lecture the name of my country, and I find myself among gentlemen whom I consider friends of Chili, I venture to say that that country was the first in South America to offer its cordial and effective support to the great idea of encircling the world with the telegraph. While, in fact, by its geographical position, Chili is in want of such a means of shortening distances, the telegraph will benefit it more than any other nation, owing to its exclusion by nature from intercourse with other nations. Chili is fond of telegraphs-is fond of everything that brings progress. (Applause.) We had our pivot line of telegraphs in 1850, and now we have the whole country spanned by them.

A line has been proposed from Panamá to Valparaiso. Chili is the only country through which telegraph lines could go from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.It will not be adventurous to say that this line will soon be completed.

I hope these facts will induce some of your enterprising men to study it, and invest their capital.

Señor Mackenna alluded to the monopolizing of the commerce of Chili by England, a fact which he hoped would not long continue.

The speaker ended with a brilliant allusion to the Monroe doctrine. Its vital principle was the power which bound together the republics of this continent, and without which they could not exist. He hoped the time would come when it would be enunciated not only by editors and orators, but by such men as General Grant and General Schenck through the mouth of the cannon. (Iminense applause.)

A vote of thanks to Señor Mackenna was passed unanimously."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

To the Hon. Thomas H. Nelson, Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from the United States of America to Chili, as a slight testimony of sincere friendship and profound sympathy with him in his just sorrow for the irreparable loss suffered by America in the death of ABRAHAM LINCOLN, sixteenth President of the United States.

"One mournful wail is heard from shore to shore,

A Nation's heart is stricken to the core;

And Freedom, kneeling with uncovered head,

Weeps by the altar of Our Country's Dead."

ALBERT EVANS-On the Death of President Lincoln.

I.

A sudden and overwhelming calamity has befallen America!

The bells of all the cities have tolled mournfully; the flags of all nations have been draped with the habiliments of woe; all countenances display deep anguish; days of humiliation, fasting and prayer have been observed by all creeds-in a word, it may be said, without hyperbole, that the world discovered by Columbus has been overwhelmed with grief.

And wherefore ?

Is it perchance that tidings of some unheard-of catastrophe have been received at the same time throughout all countries? Of fire, shipwreck, pestilence, overwhelming inundations ? What fearful plague has the wrath of Heaven let loose upon the earth? Alas! it is none of

these which make men's hearts grow faint and their foreheads bow low beneath the chastening rod! The horror of all that is about us has effaced from our minds horror itself. And therefore it is that the most sanguinary battles fail to agonize the soul, that the martyrdom of a people in one grand conflagration does not receive the poor tribute of a memorial stone, and that the suddep disappearance of a city reduced to atoms causes neither dread nor wonder. Man of the present day, placed in the vast camp of ruins called life, seems more wonder-stricken at his own existence than at the unceasing destruction of all created things, as he sees opening before his feet, ever brilliant, ever fleeting, like the ignis fatuus, that other chimera, the smiling mask of death-styled futurity. What, then, has occurred?

Alas! That which has caused this deep, instantaneous, irrepressible sorrow in the hearts of all men-that which has made the old man, the child and the maiden alike leave their dwellings in search of the sad tidingsthat which has clothed all cities in mourning, and transformed the whole of America, moved by one common sentiment, into one single altar for public prayer, into one sepulchre-is the death of an HONEST MAN!

II.

Yes; Abraham Lincoln was not one of those great and terrible beings known in history as Cæsar and Hannibal, Charlemagne and Napoleon. His shoulders knew no robes more regal than the simple dress of a citizen; no crown encircled his forehead, save the sweat of rude and honest toil; his arm wielded no other weapon than the axe which felled the forest trees, that the ground they shaded might yield the sweet fruits of the earth. He was, on the contrary, that almost unknown being, an humblé apostle who had emerged from the forests of the Great West to sit in the Capitol of the Rome of free ages, and standing on the topmost of its steps, as it were on the Sinai of Holy Writ, spoke to a multitude of down-trodden beings grovelling in the vilest servitude, or weighed down by the chains placed upon them by the strong, and said to them: "Be men! for there is but one humanity. Be Christians! for there is but one God."

III.

There are men who have no ancestry and need them not. The world is their country-the human race their family. Abraham Lincoln was one of that class. No one knows with certainty from whence he came. All eyes are turned to the bright place whither he is going. His baptismal certificate would appear to be inscribed in the vault of that heaven whose brilliant rays illuminate his 'redeeming march; and, therefore, as he falls on one side the victim of an assassin's stroke, he is seen to rise, crowned with resplendent lights, to ascend to the highest place in the Kingdom of the Just!

The earthly life of such grand spirits is not an existence: it is a mission. Hence it is, that they make their appearance but at the interval of centuries. Between the initiatory mission of George Washington and the culminating mission of Abraham Lincoln, the American race had passed through an entire era.

The colonist and the slave were the two extremes of that grand spiritual transformation of the inhabited globe known as "Democracy."

Washington changed the first into a citizen, and passed away, great, sublime, almost sanctified, to be claimed by all ages.

Lincoln changed the second into a man, and for this he falls a martyr; the whole earth his sepulchre.

Heroes in goodness! Blessed be ye throughout all ages and amongst all men !

IV.

But who was Abraham Lincoln, as a moral being and as a character, as the living agent of that supreme goodness which seemed to be incorporated with, and a very part of, his immortal spirit? That is what we shall endeavor to show in these hastily prepared lines. Some incidents, made known by sorrowing and absent friends, and a few of those pages, covered with the emblems of mourning, which have been scattered by the press, are all that we have with which to delineate to our countrymen that noble figure of goodness, which should be attempted only by the greatest artists, and not by our feeble hand.