I am sure, at least, that when our distinguished friends from England return to their native land they will hasten to besiege His Excellency to tell them where the Americans are kept who speak only once in four years.  And if they will but remain through the winter, they will discover that if our orators are turned loose upon the public only once in four years, they are turned loose in private all the rest of the time; and if the experience and observation of our guests are as fortunate as mine, they will learn that there are certain orators of both branches of the English-speaking race—­not one hundred miles from me at this moment—­whom the public would gladly hear, if they were turned loose upon it every four hours.

Wendell Phillips used to say that as soon as a Yankee baby could sit up in his cradle, he called the nursery to order and proceeded to address the house.  If this Parliamentary instinct is irrepressible, if all the year round we are listening to orations, speeches, lectures, sermons, and the incessant, if not always soothing, oratory of the press, to which His Honor the Mayor is understood to be a closely attentive listener, we have at least the consolation of knowing that the talking countries are the free countries, and that the English-speaking races are the invincible legions of liberty.

The sentiment which you have read, Mr. Chairman, describes in a few comprehensive words the historic characteristics of the English-speaking race.  That it is the founder of commonwealths, let the miracle of empire which we have wrought upon the Western Continent attest:—­its advance from the seaboard with the rifle and the ax, the plow and the shuttle, the teapot and the Bible, the rocking-chair and the spelling-book, the bath-tub and a free constitution, sweeping across the Alleghanies, over-spreading the prairies and pushing on until the dash of the Atlantic in their ears dies in the murmur of the Pacific; and as the wonderful Goddess of the old mythology touched earth, flowers and fruits answered her footfall, so in the long trail of this advancing race, it has left clusters of happy States, teeming with a population, man by man, more intelligent and prosperous than ever before the sun shone upon, and each remoter camp of that triumphal march is but a further outpost of English-speaking civilization.

That it is the pioneer of progress, is written all over the globe to the utmost islands of the sea, and upon every page of the history of civil and religious and commercial freedom.  Every factory that hums with marvelous machinery, every railway and steamer, every telegraph and telephone, the changed systems of agriculture, the endless and universal throb and heat of magical invention, are, in their larger part, but the expression of the genius of the race that with Watts drew from the airiest vapor the mightiest of motive powers, with Franklin leashed the lightning, and with Morse outfabled fairy lore.  The race that extorted from kings the charter of its political rights has won, from the princes and powers of the air, the earth and the water, the secret of supreme dominion, the illimitable franchise of beneficent progress.