A Memorial Address delivered before both houses of Congress, at their request, in the hall of the House of Representatives, February 27, 1882.

[The day had been dedicated by Congress for memorial services throughout the country to the late President. Mr. Blaine-had for years been a close friend of President Garfield, and in his Cabinet was Secretary of State.]

MR. PRESIDENT:- - For the second time in this generation 5 the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President./Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of 10 his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. "Who- 15 ever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous 20 smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character."

From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the 25 uprising against Charles First, about twenty thousand emigrants came from old England to New England. As

they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his 5 most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the colonies in 1620 would have been accounted a deserter to leave after 1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave religious freedom to the people, I sent Charles to the block, and committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the Supreme Executive authority of England. The English emigration was never renewed, and from these twenty thousand men with a small emigration from Scotland and from France are descended the vast numbers 15 who have New England blood in their veins.

In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries four hundred thousand Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects - merchants of capital, 20 skilled manufacturers and handicraftsmen, superior at the time to all others in Europe. A considerable number of these Huguenot French came to America; a few landed in New England and became honorably prominent in its history. Their names have in large part become anglicised, 25 or have disappeared, but their blood is traceable in many of the most reputable families, and their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful institutions.

From these two sources, the English-Puritan and the French-Huguenot, came the late President his father, 30 Abram Garfield, being descended from the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from the other.

It was good stock on both sides. none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of imperishable love of liberty, of 35 undying adherence to principle. Garfield was proud of his blood; and, with as much satisfaction as if he were a British

nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in Burke's Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in descent from the brave French Protestants who refused to submit to tyranny even from the Grand 5 Monarque.

General Garfield delighted to dwell on these traits, and, during his only visit to England, he busied himself in discovering every trace of his forefathers in parish registries and on ancient army rolls. Sitting with a friend in the 10 gallery of the House of Commons, one night after a long day's labor in this field of research, he said, with evident elation, that in every war in which for three centuries patriots of English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government and human liberty, his family had 15 been represented. They were at Marston Moor, at Naseby and at Preston; they were at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga, and at Monmouth, and in his own person had battled for the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of the States.

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Losing his father before he was two years old, the early life of Garfield was one of privation, but its poverty has been made indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections 25 of our large cities. General Garfield's infancy and youth had none of their destitution, none of their pitiful features appealing to the tender heart and to the open hand of charity. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was 30 a poor boy; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy; in the sense in which a large majority of the eminent men of America in all generations have been poor boys. Before a great multitude of men, in a public speech, Mr. Webster bore this testimony:

35 "It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but

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my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the snow drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, 10 the kindred ties, the early affections and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all I know of this primitive family abode."

With the requisite change of scene the same words would aptly portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the 15 frontier, where all are engaged in a common struggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty, different in kind, different in influence and effect from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to 20 contrast itself with neighboring wealth, on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and has the boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it. No man ever grew up in the agricultural regions 25 of the West, where a house-raising or even a corn-husking, is a matter of common interest and helpfulness, with any other feeling than that of broad-minded, generous independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood 30 and brain now training for the future citizenship and future government of the republic. Garfield was born heir to land, to the title of freeholder, which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the Anglo-Saxon race ever since Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores of England. His 35 adventure on the canal - an alternative between that and the deck of a Lake Erie schooner was a farmer boy's

device for earning money, just as the New England lad begins a possibly great career by sailing before the mast on a coasting vessel or on a merchantman bound to the farther India or to the China seas.

No manly man feels anything of shame in looking back 5 to early struggles with adverse circumstances, and no man feels a worthier pride than when he has conquered the obstacles to his progress. But no one of noble mould desires to be looked upon as having occupied a menial position, as having been repressed by a feeling of inferiority, 10 or as having suffered the evils of poverty until relief was found at the hand of charity. General Garfield's youth presented no hardships which family love and family energy did not overcome, subjected him to no privations which he did not cheerfully accept, and left no memories save those 15 which were recalled with delight and transmitted with profit and with pride.

Garfield's early opportunities for securing an education were extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to develop in him an intense desire to learn. He could read at three 20 years of age, and each winter he had the advantage of the district school. He read all the books to be found within the circle of his acquaintance; some of them he got by heart. While yet in childhood he was a constant student of the Bible, and became familiar with its literature. The dig- 25 nity and earnestness of his speech in his maturer life gave evidence of this early training. At eighteen years of age he was able to teach school, and thenceforward his ambition was to obtain a college education. To this end he bent all his efforts, working in the harvest field, at the carpenter's bench, 30 and, in the winter season, teaching the common schools of the neighborhood. While thus laboriously occupied he found time to prosecute his studies, and was so successful that at twenty-two years of age he was able to enter the junior class at Williams College, then under the Presidency of the vener- 35 able and honored Mark Hopkins, who, in the fullness of his