We’ve changed our minds—­at least about some things.  We’ve not only forgiven our countrymen; whom our guest used to sympathize with; but we have put—­and are getting ready to put—­the most of them into office!  What we are most anxious about just now is, whether they are going to forgive us!  Seriously, gentlemen, we are very glad to see Mr. Sala here again.  He was a veteran in the profession in which so many of you are interested, worthily wearing the laurels won in many fields, and enjoying the association, esteem, and trust of a great master whose fame the world holds precious, when the most of us were fledglings.  We all know him as a wit, a man of letters, and a man of the world.  Some of us have known him also in that pleasanter character of all clubmen described in the old phrase, ’a jolly good fellow.’  On the other side of the Atlantic the grasp he gives an American hand is a warm one; and we do not mean that in New York he shall feel away from home.  I give you, gentlemen, ’The health and prosperity of George Augustus Sala.’”]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE LOTOS CLUB:  I am under the deepest feeling of gratitude to Mr. Whitelaw Reid for having torn the mask from the face of the stealthy conspirator, for having exposed the wily plotter and insidious libeller, and defied the malignant Copperhead. [Applause.] I thought that I had long ago been choked with that venom; but no, it rises still and poisons all that belongs to his otherwise happy condition.  Gentlemen, I am indeed an enemy of the United States.  I am he who has come here to requite your hospitalities with unfounded calumny and to bite the hand that has fed me.  Unfortunately there are so many hands that have fed me that it will take me from this time until to-morrow morning to bite all the friendly hands.

With regard to events that took place twenty years ago and of which I was an interested spectator, I may say that albeit I was mistaken; but the mistake was partaken of by many hundred thousands of my fellow-countrymen, who had not the courage subsequently to avow that they had been mistaken, but yet set to curry favor with the North by saying that they had always been their friends.  The only apology—­if apology I should choose to make—­would be this:  that that which I had to say against you I said while I was in your midst, when I was living at the Brevoort House; and when my letters came weekly back from England; and when it was quite in your power to have ridden me out on a rail or to have inflicted on me any of the ordinary visitations which a malignant Copperhead was supposed to deserve.  But you did not do so, and I remember that when I left New York, I had quite as many good, kind, cordial friends on the Union League side as I had on the Democratic side.  I would say further that when I came to publish my letters I found that there were many statements which I had made, which seemed to me to have been hasty and inconsiderate, and I did my best to modify them; and I did not wait until I got home to malign the people from whom I had received hospitality.