But perhaps I have not yet reached the most essential cause of the odium.  Men will forgive a man almost anything if he only fails; but we, alas! have committed the crime of success. [Laughter and applause.] It makes people angry when they see New England prospering, influential, the banker of the country, leading public sentiment, shaping legislation.  Men would not mind so much if this success were attained by a happy accident, or were the result of a favoring fortune; but it is aggravating to see the New Englanders, to whom Providence has given nothing but rocks and ice and weather—­a great deal of it—­and a thermometer [laughter], yet mining gold in Colorado, chasing the walrus off the Aleutian Islands, building railroads in Dakota, and covering half the continent with insurance, and underlying it with a mortgage.  Success is the one unpardonable crime. [Renewed laughter and applause.]

It is true, when a man has so far acknowledged his participation in the common frailty as to die, then men begin to condone his faults; and by the time he is dead one or two hundred years they find him quite tolerable.  An eminent ecclesiastic in the Anglican Church recently pronounced the greatest of the Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, “the most righteous ruler England ever had.”  A man who is dead is out of the way.  We live in the home which he built, and are not disturbed by the chips and sawdust and noise, and perhaps the casualties and mistakes, which attended its building.  I will offer a definition (without charge) to the editors of the magnificent “Century Dictionary”:  “Saint—­a man with convictions, who has been dead a hundred years; canonized now, cannonaded then.” [Laughter and applause.]

We are building monuments now to the Abolitionists.  It is quite possible that when a hundred winters shall have shed their snows upon the lonely grave at North Elba, the Old Dominion will take pride in the fact that she for a little while gave a home to the latest—­I trust not the last—­of the Puritans; and the traveller, in 1959, as he goes through Harper’s Ferry, may see upon the site of the old engine-house, looking out upon the regenerate Commonwealth, cunningly graven in bronze, copied perhaps from the bust in your own Union League, the undaunted features of John Brown. [Applause.] And the South that is to be, standing uncovered beside the grave of the Union soldier, will say:  “It was for us, too, that he died,” and will render beside the tomb in the capital city of Illinois a reverence akin to that which she pays amid the shades of Mount Vernon. [Great applause.]

The Czar of to-day honors the memory of John Howard (who died a hundred years ago next January), and offers 15,000 roubles for an essay on his life; but when George Kennan, following in the steps of Howard, draws back the curtain and shows the shuddering horrors in the prisons of Siberia, the Czar would willingly offer much more than 15,000 roubles for a successful essay upon his life.  John Howard sleeps in innocuous silence at Kherson; George Kennan speaks through the everywhere-present press to the court of last appeal, the civilized world. [Applause.]