An earnest people and a generous!  The Civil strife made nothing right that was wrong before, and nothing wrong that was right before; it simply settled the question of where the greater strength lay.  We know that

              “Who overcomes
  By force, hath overcome but half his foe,”

and that if more remains to be done, it must come because the hearts of men are changed.  The war is over; the very subject is hackneyed; it is a tale that is told, and commerce and enlightened self-interest have obliterated all lines.  And yet you must forgive us if, before the account is finally closed, and the dead and the woe and the tears are balanced by all the blessings of a reunited country, some of us still listen for a voice we have not yet heard; if we wait for some Southern leader to tell us that renewed participation in the management of the affairs of this nation carries with it the admission that the question of the right of secession is settled, not because the South was vanquished, but because the doctrine was and is wrong, forever wrong. [Great applause.]

We are a plain people, too, and live far away.  We find all the excitement we need in the two great political parties, and rather look upon the talk of anybody in either party being better than his party, as a sort of cant.  The hypercritical faculty has not reached us yet, and we leave to you of the East the exclusive occupancy of the raised dais upon which it seems necessary for the independent voter to stand while he is counted. [Applause and laughter.]

We are provincial; we have no distinctive literature and no great poets; our leading personage abroad of late seems to be the Honorable “Buffalo Bill” [laughter], and we use our adjectives so recklessly that the polite badinage indulged in toward each other by your New York editors to us seems tame and spiritless.  In mental achievement we may not have fully acquired the use of the fork, and are “but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”  We stand toward the East somewhat as country to city cousins; about as New to Old England, only we don’t feel half so badly about it, and on the whole are rather pleased with ourselves. [Laughter.] There is not in the whole broad West a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is not within reach of it.  With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time to live manly lives and to lend a hand.  All this may not be aesthetic, but it is virile, and it leads up and not down.  Great poets, and those who so touch the hearts of men that the vibration goes down the ages, must often find their inspiration when wealth brings leisure to a class, or must have “learned in suffering what they teach in song.”  We can wait for our inspired ones; when they come, the work of this generation, obscure and commonplace, will have paved the way for them; the general intelligence diffused in this half century will, unknown or forgotten, yet live in their numbers, and the vivid imaginations of our New England ancestors, wasted in depicting the joys and torments of the world to come, will, modified by the years, beautify and ennoble the cares of this. [Applause.]