Sir, with all my heart, and, I am sure, with the hearty assent of this great and representative company, I respond to the final aspiration of your toast:  “May this great family in all its branches ever work together for the world’s welfare.”  Certainly its division and alienation would be the world’s misfortune.  That England and America have had sharp and angry quarrels is undeniable.  Party spirit in this country, recalling old animosity, has always stigmatized with the English name whatever it opposed.  Every difference, every misunderstanding with England has been ignobly turned to party account; but the two great branches of this common race have come of age, and wherever they may encounter a serious difficulty which must be accommodated they have but to thrust demagogues aside, to recall the sublime words of Abraham Lincoln, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” and in that spirit, and in the spirit and the emotion represented in this country by the gentlemen upon my right and my left, I make bold to say to Mr. Chamberlain, in your name, there can be no misunderstanding which may not be honorably and happily adjusted.  For to our race, gentlemen of both countries, is committed not only the defense, but the illustration of constitutional liberty.

The question is not what we did a century ago, or in the beginning of this century, with the lights that shone around us, but what is our duty to-day, in the light which is given to us of popular government under the republican form in this country, and the parliamentary form in England.

If a sensitive public conscience, if general intelligence should not fail to secure us from unnatural conflict, then liberty will not be justified of her children, and the glory of the English-speaking race will decline.  I do not believe it.  I believe that it is constantly increasing, and that the colossal power which slumbers in the arms of a kindred people will henceforth be invoked, not to drive them further asunder, but to weld them more indissolubly together in the defense of liberty under law.

WOMAN

BY HORACE PORTER

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—­When this toast was proposed to me, I insisted that it ought to be responded to by a bachelor, by some one who is known as a ladies’ man; but in these days of female proprietorship it is supposed that a married person is more essentially a ladies’ man than anybody else, and it was thought that only one who had the courage to address a lady could have the courage, under these circumstances, to address the New England Society.