Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 556 pages of information about Modern Eloquence.

Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 556 pages of information about Modern Eloquence.

Now, I submit, we have here a clear case of the application of the great principle of honest, even-handed co-operation, no modern device in that line could surpass it.  It is true the Indians were not an incorporated society, and so there was no receiver appointed to wind them up. [Laughter.] “Which they brought,” says the writer, “to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor” (meaning Governor Bradford), “our captain, and others.”  Governor Bradford, in speaking of this, tells us that among the fowl brought in “was a great store of turkeys.”  Thus begins the sad history in this country of the rise and annual fall on Thanksgiving days of that exalted biped—­the American turkey.  After this description of a Pilgrim festival day who shall ever again say the Pilgrims could not be merry if they had half a chance to be so.  Why, if the Harvard and Yale football teams had been on hand with their great national game of banging each others’ eyes and breaking bones promiscuously, they could not have added to the spirit of the day though they might to its variety of pastime. [Laughter.]

It is interesting to remember in this connection that in the earlier years of the colonies, Thanksgiving day did not come every year.  It came at various periods of the year from May to December, and the intervals between them sometimes four or five years, gradually shortened and then finally settled into an annual festival on the last Thursday of November.  A few years ago two Governors of Maine ventured to appoint a day in December for Thanksgiving.  Neither of them was re-elected. [Laughter.] The crowning step in this development, which is now national, was when the fortunes of our late war were in favor of the Union, and a proclamation for a national Thanksgiving was issued by our then President, dear old Abraham Lincoln. [Applause.] That the festival shall hereafter and forever be national is a part of our unwritten law. [Applause.] It will thus be seen that we, the sons of the Pilgrims, may fairly and modestly claim that this feature of our national life, like most of the others that are valuable, proceeded directly from Plymouth Rock.  The New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, will ever honor the work and the memory of the fathers.  As in the sweet lines of Bryant: 

  “Till where the sun, with softer fires,
     Looks on the vast Pacific’s sleep,
   The children of the Pilgrim sires
     This hallowed day, like us, shall keep.”

[General applause.]

WILLIAM WINTER

TRIBUTE TO JOHN GILBERT

[Speech of William Winter at a dinner given by the Lotos Club, New York City, November 30, 1878, to John Gilbert, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his first appearance on the stage.  Whitelaw Reid presided.  William Winter responded to the toast “The Dramatic Critic.”]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—­I thank you

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Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.