Modern Eloquence Volume Iii Part 10

GENTLEMEN, MEMBERS OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY, AND OUR HONORED GUESTS:--My first duty is to welcome to our Board the representatives of the various societies who honor us by their presence: St. George's, St. Nicholas, New England, St. Andrew's, Colonial Order, and Colonial Wars, Southern Society, the Holland Society welcomes you most heartily. I ought to say that the Holland Society, as at present const.i.tuted, could run a Police Board [applause], furnish the Mayors for two cities, and judges to order, to decide on any kind of a case. As a matter of fact, when they get hard up down-town for a judge, they just send up to the man who happens to be President of the Holland Society and say "Now we want a judge," and we send Van Hoesen, Beekman, Truax, or Van Wyck. [Applause.]

They are all right. They are Dutch, and they will do. [Laughter.] All the people say it does not make any difference about their politics, so long as the blood is right.

Now, gentlemen, seriously, I thank you very sincerely for the honor which you have conferred upon me--and which I was not able, on account of circ.u.mstances entirely beyond my control, to acknowledge at the annual meeting of the Society--in making me your President. I do not think there is any honor in the world that compares with it, and if you think over the names of the Presidents of this Society you may imagine that a doctor, especially knowing what the Dutch in South Africa think of doctors just now [laughter and applause], would have a mighty slim chance to come in against a Van Vorst, a Roosevelt, a Van Hoesen, a Beekman, a Van Wyck, or a Van Norden. But my name is not Jameson.

[Laughter.]

Gentlemen, there seems to be an impression that the Holland Society, because it does not have a Club-house--and it may have a Club-house, that remains for you to decide; and because it does not have a great many other things, has no reason for its existence. But, gentlemen, there is one sufficient reason for the existence of the Hollanders in a Society. We have eight hundred and forty members, and each one of us has a function--to teach our neighboring Yankees just exactly what we are, whence we came, and where we mean to go. [Laughter and applause.] The colossal ignorance of the ordinary New Englander [laughter and applause]--I mean in regard to the Dutch [laughter]--is something that I would delineate were it not for the presence of the President of the Mayflower Society. [Renewed laughter.] Why, it was only the other night that at one of these entertainments when I was representing you and doing the best I could with my medal and my ribbon, that a friend came up to me and said: "You belong to the Holland Society, don't you?" I said, "Yes." "Well," he said, "you Dutch did lick us on the Excise question, didn't you?" [Great laughter and applause.] Now what are you going to do with a people like that? We got the credit of that thing, anyhow. [Renewed laughter.] There is a Governor of Connecticut here to-night [P. C. Lounsbury], and I was going to say something about Governors of Connecticut of years and years ago. A man could not properly relate the history of New Amsterdam without remarking on the Governors of Connecticut, but out of respect to the distinguished gentleman, whom we all delight to honor, I shall draw it very mild. I shall only tell one or two things that those Governors of Connecticut used to do. There was one of them, I have forgotten his name and I am glad I have [laughter], who used to say in all his letters to his subordinates when they were pus.h.i.+ng us to the wall and getting the English over to help them push: "Don't you say anything to those people, don't you talk to those people, but always keep crowding the Dutch."

[Laughter.] That is what a Connecticut Governor gave as official advice years ago. And they did crowd us. But Governor Lounsbury told me that if they really had their rights Manhattan Island would belong to Connecticut. So you see they are crowding the Dutch still. [Laughter.]

Now, every once in a while, one of these New Englanders that owns the earth, especially that little stone portion called Plymouth Rock, which we never begrudged them, gets up at a great dinner and reads a fine speech and talks about civil and religious liberty which the Puritan came over to cause to flourish. Why, the poor Puritan did not know any more about religious liberty than an ordinary horse does about astronomy. What the Puritan came over here for, was to get a place to do what he liked, in his own way, without interference from anybody else, with power to keep everybody out that wanted to do anything the least bit different from his way. [Great laughter and applause. A voice--"I'm glad I voted for you."] I never can get elected from New England.

I want to tell you just a thing or two about this business. The Dutch tried very hard to teach them civil and religious liberty before they came over, and then they put the Yankees in a s.h.i.+p and sent them over from Leyden and Delfshaven, saying: "It is utterly useless; we cannot teach you." [Great laughter.] But we came over to New Amsterdam and we had free schools in New York until the English took the city by treachery when there was only Peter Stuyvesant to fire one gun against the invaders, and then they abolished free schools and had their church ones, and they are fighting over that question in England now. Free schools! New York established them when we were free again, years and years afterwards, but they are an invention of the Dutch.

Civil and religious liberty! it was born in Holland, it was nourished by the valor of the Beggars of the Sea, and finally it began to grow into the minds of the peoples of the earth, that it was not only right to enjoy your own religion, but it was also right to let your neighbor enjoy his. [Applause.]

Then there is another story, that the English conquered Manhattan Island, and that we are here by the grace of any people on earth except our own. That is another mistake. Just read Theodore Roosevelt's "Rise of New York." [Great laughter.] Now I am going to tell you this story because you must go up to Ulster County and up to Dutchess and Albany Counties, and you must tell every Yankee you meet the truth about this, and not let him talk any more about the English having subjugated the Dutch.

It is true the English captured Manhattan Island, but nine years afterwards Admiral Evertsen and another Admiral whose name escapes me, came up the harbor in two frigates with guns well shotted, got beyond Staten Island, and gave the military authorities of New York notice that they were going to take that town, and granted them thirty minutes to make up their minds whether they would give it up or not. When the thirty minutes elapsed, six hundred Dutch troops were landed just back of where Trinity Church now is, and New York became New Amsterdam again.

Then how did we lose it? Because the Dutch States-General, which did not know enough, in deciding between New York and Surinam, to choose New York, took Surinam, and they have been wis.h.i.+ng ever since they never had been born. Now talk about anybody conquering the Dutch! We generally get there. They sometimes say: "That is all very well, they were very brave people and all that, but they don't do anything now." Waterloo, Van Speyk, Majuba Hill, and the Boers of the Transvaal show what their courage has been in the later generations. What are the Dutch? Why, we are the salt of the earth! We do not pretend to be the bread and b.u.t.ter and the cheese, but we are the salt [laughter], and I think the Boers in South Africa very lately salted some people I know of. [Great laughter and applause.]

If you want to see a city that is well salted, look at New York. Go to the St. Nicholas Society dinner and see that grand a.s.sembly; if there is ever a society in New York that is well salted with Dutch, that is, and we are all proud of it. And so it is with every other society, New York society, but not on the paternal side! [Great laughter and applause.]

But if you want to see a place where the Yankee is salt, pepper, bread, b.u.t.ter, and everything, go to Boston. It is a great city. That is all right. But we prefer New York, and we prefer just what G.o.d has ordained us to be--the people not always getting the credit of it, but always accomplis.h.i.+ng all the good that is ever accomplished on the face of the earth! [Laughter and applause.] Now you may think that I have not whooped it up enough for the Dutch [great laughter], so I will go on, just for a minute.

The State of North Carolina is always talking about having had a Declaration of Independence in Mecklenburg County, about six months before they had one in Philadelphia. Why, the Dutch farmers up in the Mamacotting Valley of Ulster County signed a Declaration of Independence in April, 1775, and they would have signed it six months before if the New York Council of Safety had given it to them! [Laughter.] This same New England gentleman to whom I have alluded--I have it rather mixed up in my mind which gentleman said it--but some one said that the New Englanders were very unwilling to part from the English, who were patronizing them with tea and stamps. Why, the liberty boys of New York had made up their minds many months before the Declaration of Independence. The Dutch, and notably the Scotch-Irish, had made up their minds. As I say, up in Ulster County they circulated that Declaration of Independence a year and three months before it was really signed in Philadelphia. They knew what they meant. They said, "We shall never be slaves." If you will excuse the fact that I did have a great-grandfather--I am happy to say that my great-grandfather signed that paper and he had a commission in the Continental Army, which I possess, signed by John Hanc.o.c.k, and he was at Saratoga. He was in the 2d New York Line. The Dutch knew that what we wanted was to be a free and independent people, even if our friends over there had not made up their minds. The Dutch are satisfied with a very modest position in the world--so that they have the goods and control its destinies. [Great laughter.] Others may call it New York, if they like, or Manhattan, but we call it Dutch.

Now this Society, gentlemen, has a great work before it; our President, who is very much like the President of the French Republic, goes around with a big ribbon, but he has no authority of any kind whatever. He might have some at the Board of Trustees meeting, but that is such an orderly set that there is no use for authority there, and as for the dinner, Judge Van Hoesen and Mr. Van Schaick manage it very well. But the President does not wish any authority, and glories in the great honor, which it seems to him to be one that any one in this Society might be proud of. We have, however, work to do, and in that your President, by your grace, as a private member and as a trustee, hopes to co-operate with you.

It is a strange thing that this great city of New York has allowed the Puritans first to commemorate the virtues of their heroic race which we all admire, and all love to speak of in terms of praise in our serious moments. It is strange that Central Park is adorned by them with that beautiful statue, while the Dutch have no monument. I well remember the day that that silver-tongued orator, George William Curtis, made the dedication address. But why is it that on this Hudson, which was first ploughed by a Dutch keel, over which first of all a Dutch flag floated, along this Hudson which was first discovered and explored and made habitable by Dutch industry and Dutch thrift, there is no Dutch monument to which we may proudly point as we pa.s.s by. There ought to be a statue of that great Dutchman, William the Silent, on Riverside Drive. [Great applause.] Do you ever think of him? Do you ever think of his career, that of the prototype of our own Was.h.i.+ngton? At fifteen years of age the companion of an emperor; at twenty-one years of age, the commander of a great army, and later giving up wealth and pomp and power, preferring to be among the people of G.o.d, than to dwell at ease in the tents of wickedness; giving up everything for a life of tedious struggle in the cold marshes of the Netherlands, finally to die at the hand of an a.s.sa.s.sin with a prayer for his country upon his lips as he pa.s.sed away.

He was the first human being on the face of this earth, who fairly and fully understood the principles of religious and civic freedom. This great city, the exemplifier of those principles to which it owes so much for its prosperity and magnificence, has not yet commemorated that man.

How long shall it be, sons of Hollanders, before William the Silent shall be there looking out upon the Hudson and lifted on high as an example for all time? I hope our eyes will see the day! [Great applause.]

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

THE HOLLANDER AS AN AMERICAN

[Speech of Theodore Roosevelt at the eleventh annual dinner of the Holland Society of New York, January 15, 1896. The President, Dr.

D. B. St. John Roosa, said: "The next regular toast is: 'The Hollander as an American,' and I shall have the pleasure of introducing a gentleman who is a member of this Society, and, therefore, descended on the male line [laughter] from some one who came here before 1675, is it not? [A voice--"That is right; 1675."]

One of the first Roosevelts came very near outstripping Robert Fulton and inventing the steamboat. He did invent a steamboat, and you know the Roosevelts have had something of a steamboat in them ever since. Now there is another thing I want you Dutchmen to teach the Yankees to do--p.r.o.nounce his name Rosavelt and not Rusevelt.

And, by the way, mine is p.r.o.nounced Rosa too. Now Mr. Roosevelt is a man, evidently, who has the courage of his convictions [A Voice--"That is right." Applause], and it will be a cold day for the party to which he belongs if they undertake to turn him down. I hoped that you all thought so. There was an old darky that used to say about the Commandments: 'Yes, preacher, they are all right, but in this here neighborhood the eighth Commandment ought to be taught with some discreetions.' [Great laughter.] [A Voice: "Which is the eighth Commandment?"] 'Thou shalt not steal.' Now in New York there are some people who think there are some commandments that ought to be taught with some 'discreetions.' But they had better alter their law if they don't like it, and they had better not put a Dutchman in office after an oath to enforce the law and then ask him why he does enforce it. [Great applause.] This gentleman does not need any introduction, evidently--the Hon. Theodore Roosevelt." [Great applause. Three cheers were proposed and given for Mr. Roosevelt. A Voice: "Tiger!"] Mr. Roosevelt: "In the presence of the judiciary, no!" [Laughter.] There was great cheering when Mr. Roosevelt rose to respond.]

MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN, AND BRETHREN OF THE HOLLAND SOCIETY:--I am more than touched, if you will permit me to begin rather seriously, by the way you have greeted me to-night. When I was in Was.h.i.+ngton, there was a story in reference to a certain President, who was not popular with some of his own people in a particular Western State. One of its Senators went to the White House and said he wanted a friend of his appointed postmaster of Topeka. The President's Private Secretary said: "I am very sorry, indeed, sir, but the President wants to appoint a personal friend." Thereupon the Senator said: "Well, for G.o.d's sake, if he has one friend in Kansas, let him appoint him!" [Great laughter.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _THEODORE ROOSEVELT_

_Photogravure after a photograph from life_]

There have been periods during which the dissembled eulogies of the able press and my relations with about every politician of every party and every faction have made me feel I would like to know whether I had one friend in New York, and here I feel I have many. [Great applause.] And more than that, gentlemen, I should think ill of myself and think that I was a discredit to the stock from which I sprang if I feared to go on along the path that I deemed right, whether I had few friends or many.

[Cries of "Good! Good!" and great applause.]

I am glad to answer to the toast, "The Hollander as an American." The Hollander was a good American, because the Hollander was fitted to be a good citizen. There are two branches of government which must be kept on a high plane, if any nation is to be great. A nation must have laws that are honestly and fearlessly administered, and a nation must be ready, in time of need, to fight [applause], and we men of Dutch descent have here to-night these gentlemen of the same blood as ourselves who represent New York so worthily on the bench, and a Major-General of the Army of the United States. [Applause.]

It seems to me, at times, that the Dutch in America have one or two lessons to teach. We want to teach the very refined and very cultivated men who believe it impossible that the United States can ever be right in a quarrel with another nation--a little of the elementary virtue of patriotism. [Cries of "Good! Good!" and applause.] And we also wish to teach our fellow-citizens that laws are put on the statute books to be enforced [cries of "Hear! Hear!" and applause]; and that if it is not intended they shall be enforced, it is a mistake to put a Dutchman in office to enforce them.

The lines put on the programme underneath my toast begin: "America!

half-brother of the world!" America, half-brother of the world--and all Americans full brothers one to the other. That is the way that the line should be concluded. The prime virtue of the Hollander here in America and the way in which he has most done credit to his stock as a Hollander, is that he has ceased to be a Hollander and has become an American, absolutely. [Great applause.] We are not Dutch-Americans. We are not "Americans" with a hyphen before it. We are Americans pure and simple, and we have a right to demand that the other people whose stocks go to compose our great nation, like ourselves, shall cease to be aught else and shall become Americans. [Cries of "Hear! Hear!" and applause.]

And further than that, we have another thing to demand, and that is that if they do honestly and in good faith become Americans, those shall be regarded as infamous who dare to discriminate against them because of creed or because of birthplace. When New Amsterdam had but a few hundred souls, among those few hundred souls no less than eighteen different race-stocks were represented, and almost as many creeds as there were race-stocks, and the great contribution that the Hollander gave to the American people was, as your President has so ably said, the inestimable lesson of complete civil and religious liberty. It would be honor enough for this stock to have been the first to put on American soil the public school, the great engine for grinding out American citizens, the one inst.i.tution for which Americans should stand more stiffly than for aught other. [Great applause.]

Whenever America has demanded of her sons that they should come to her aid, whether in time of peace or in time of war, the Americans of Dutch stock have been among the first to spring to the aid of the country. We earnestly hope that there will not in the future be any war with any power, but a.s.suredly if there should be such a war one thing may be taken for certain, and that is that every American of Dutch descent will be found on the side of the United States. We give the amplest credit, that some people now, to their shame, grudge to the profession of arms, which we have here to-night represented by a man, who, when he has the t.i.tle of a Major-General of the Army of the United States [Thomas H.

Ruger], has a t.i.tle as honorable as any that there is on the wide earth.

[Applause.] We also need to teach the lesson, that the Hollander taught, of not refusing to do the small things because the day of large things had not yet come or was in the past; of not waiting until the chance may come to distinguish ourselves in arms, and meanwhile neglecting the plain, prosaic duties of citizens.h.i.+p which call upon us every hour, every day of our lives.

The Dutch kept their freedom in the great contest with Spain, not merely because they warred valiantly, but because they did their duty as burghers in their cities, because they strove according to the light that was in them to be good citizens and to act as such. And we all here to-night should strive so to live that we Americans of Dutch descent shall not seem to have shrunk in this respect, compared to our fathers who spoke another tongue and lived under other laws beyond the ocean; so that it shall be acknowledged in the end to be what it is, a discredit to a man if he does not in times of peace do all that in him lies to make the government of the city, the government of the country, better and cleaner by his efforts. [Great applause.]

I spoke of the militant spirit as if it may only be shown in time of war. I think that if any of you gentlemen, no matter how peaceful you may naturally be, and I am very peaceful naturally [laughter], if you would undertake the administration of the Police Department you would have plenty of fighting on hand before you would get through [renewed laughter]; and if you are true to your blood you will try to do the best you can, fighting or not fighting. You will make up your mind that you will make mistakes, because you won't make anything if you don't make some mistakes, and you will go forward according to your lights, utterly heedless of what either politicians or newspapers may say, knowing that if you act as you feel bound according to your conscience to act, you will then at least have the right when you go out of office, however soon [laughter], to feel that you go out without any regret, and to feel that you have, according to your capacity, warred valiantly for what you deemed to be the right. [Great applause.]

These, then, are the qualities that I should claim for the Hollander as an American: In the first place, that he has cast himself without reservation into the current of American life; that he is an American, pure and simple, and nothing else. In the next place, that he works hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder with his fellow Americans, without any regard to differences of creed or to differences of race and religion, if only they are good Americans. [Great applause.] In the third place, that he is willing, when the need shall arise, to fight for his country; and in the fourth place, and finally, that he recognizes that this is a country of laws and not men, that it is his duty as an honest citizen to uphold the laws, to strive for honesty, to strive for a decent administration, and to do all that in him lies, by incessant, patient work in our government, munic.i.p.al or national, to bring about the day when it shall be taken as a matter of course that every public official is to execute a law honestly, and that no capacity in a public officer shall atone if he is personally dishonest. [Tremendous applause.]

TRUE AMERICANISM AND EXPANSION

[Speech of Theodore Roosevelt at the nineteenth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1898.

The President, William B. Davenport, in calling upon Theodore Roosevelt to speak to the toast, "The Day we Celebrate," said: "For many years we have been celebrating this day and looking at ourselves through Yankee eyes. To-night it is to be given us to see ourselves as others see us. We have with us one of whom it may be said, to paraphrase the epitaph in the Welsh churchyard:--

'A Dutchman born, at Harvard bred, In Cuba travelled, but not yet dead.'

In response to this toast, I have the honor of introducing Hon.

Theodore Roosevelt."]

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:--The gentleman on my right, with the unmistakably Puritan name of McKelway, in the issue of the "Eagle" to-night alluded to me as a Yankeeized Hollander. I am a middling good Yankee. I always felt that at these dinners of the New England Society, to which I come a trifle more readily than to any other like affairs, I and the president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, who is also invariably in attendance, represent, what you would say, the victims tied to the wheels of the Roman chariot of triumph. You see I am half Irish myself, and, as I told a New England Senator with whom I am intimate, when he remarked that the Dutch had been conquered by the New Englanders, "the Irish have avenged us."

I want to say to you seriously, and, singularly enough, right along the lines of the admirable speech made by your President, a few words on the day we celebrate and what it means.

As the years go by, this nation will realize more and more that the year that has just pa.s.sed has given to every American the right to hold his head higher as a citizen of the great Republic, which has taken a long stride forward toward its proper place among the nations of the world. I have scant sympathy with this mock humanitarianism, a mock humanitarianism which is no more alien to the spirit of true religion than it is to the true spirit of civilization, which would prevent the great, free, liberty and order-loving races of the earth doing their duty in the world's waste s.p.a.ces because there must needs be some rough surgery at the outset. I do not speak simply of my own country. I hold that throughout the world every man who strives to be both efficient and moral--and neither quality is worth anything without the other--that every man should realize that it is for the interests of mankind to have the higher supplant the lower life. Small indeed is my sympathy with those people who bemoan the fact, sometimes in prose, sometimes in even weaker verse, that the champions of civilization and of righteousness have overcome the champions of barbarism or of an outworn tyranny, whether the conflict be fought by the Russian heralds of civilization in Turkestan, by the English champion of the higher life in the Eastern world, or by the men who upheld the Stars and Stripes as they freed the people of the tropic islands of the sea from the mediaeval tyranny of Spain.

I do not ask that you look at this policy from a merely national standpoint, although if you are good Americans you must look from the national standpoint first. I ask that you look at it from the standpoint of civilization, from the standpoint of righteousness, and realize that it is better for the men who are as yet ages behind us in the struggle upward that they be helped upward, and that it does not cease to be better for them, merely because it is better for us also. As I say, cast aside the selfish view. Consider whether or not it is better that the brutal barbarism of northern Asia should be supplanted by the civilization of Russia, which has not yet risen to what we of the Occident are proud to claim as our standard, but which, as it stands, is tens of centuries in advance of that of the races it supplants. Again, from the standpoint of the outsider, look at the improvement worked by the Englishmen in all the islands of the sea and all the places on the dark continents where the British flag has been planted; seriously consider the enormous, the incalculable betterment that comes at this moment to ninety-five per cent. of the people who have been cowering under the inconceivably inhuman rule of Mahdism in the Sudan because it has been supplanted by the reign of law and of justice. I ask you to read the accounts of the Catholic missionary priests, the Austrian priests who suffered under Mahdism, to read in their words what they have suffered under conditions that have gone back to the stone age in the middle of the nineteenth century. Then you will realize that the Sirdar and his troops were fighting the battle of righteousness as truly as ever it was fought by your ancestors and mine two or three or four centuries ago.