think of its members as men of deeds and not of words, except the spellbinders. [Laughter.] I fear your committee is treating me like one of those toy balloons that are sent up previous to the main ascension, to test the currents of the air; but I hope that in this sort of ballooning I may not be interrupted by the remark that interrupted a Fourth of July orator in the West when he was tickling the American Eagle under both wings, delivering himself of no end of platitudes and soaring aloft into the brilliant realms of fancy when a man in the audience quietly remarked:  “If he goes on throwing out his ballast, in that way, the Lord knows where he will land.” [Laughter.] If I demonstrate to-night that dryness is a quality not only of the champagne but of the first speech as well, you may reflect on that remark as Abraham Lincoln did at City Point after he had been shaken up the night before in his boat in a storm in Chesapeake Bay.  When he complained of the feeling of gastronomic uncertainty which we suffer on the water, a young staff officer rushed up to him with a bottle of champagne and said:  “This is the cure for that sort of an ill.”  Said the President:  “No, young man, I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very article.” [Laughter.]

The story of the life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than reality.  It is more like a fable of the ancient days than a story of a plain American of the nineteenth century.  The singular vicissitudes in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest which attaches to few men in history.  He sprang from that class which he always alluded to as the “plain people,” and never attempted to disdain them.  He believed that the government was made for the people, not the people for the government.  He felt that true Republicanism is a torch—­the more it is shaken in the hands of the people the brighter it will burn.  He was transcendently fit to be the first successful standard-bearer of the progressive, aggressive, invincible Republican party. [Loud applause.] He might well have said to those who chanced to sneer at his humble origin what a marshal of France raised from the ranks said to the haughty nobles of Vienna boasting of their long line of descent, when they refused to associate with him:  “I am an ancestor; you are only descendants!” [Laughter and cheers.] He was never guilty of any posing for effect, any attitudinizing in public, any mawkish sentimentality, any of that puppyism so often bred by power, that dogmatism which Johnson said was only puppyism grown to maturity. [Laughter.] He made no claim to knowledge he did not possess.  He felt with Addison that pedantry and learning are like hypocrisy in religion—­the form of knowledge without the power of it.  He had nothing in common with those men of mental malformation who are educated beyond their intellects. [Laughter.]