The Holland Society of New York - Yearbook (New York, NY)

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' 157 y ing the pleasure which We all anticipate in listening to one Who has proved, in his remarkable career, that the age of the printing press has no more de- stroyed the age of oratory than the chromo has supplanted the oil painting. Cflpplausej I hope that my speech, in its poverty of thought and Wit, Will be but an appetizer to the feast of eloquence to Which We will soon be treated, and therefore I simply say to Mr. Bryan, in the Words of the courteous Prince of Denmark to Laertes, at the beginning of the fatal combat: n I 'll be your foil, Laertesg in mine ignorance I Your skill shall, like a star i' the darkest night, Stick fiery off indeed. QApplause.J Indeed, I should underfthe circumstances 'hesi- tate to speak at all, but the Chairman of the Committee has assigned to me a place on the pro- gramme, and I am very, much in the position of a phlegmatic Pennsylvania Dutch soldier of whom I once heard, Who fought on the Union side inthe Civil War. In the course of one of the battles he was captured by the Confederates. While they were taking him to the rear, he said, in a perfectly placid and unconcerned Way, Vat you going to do with me? They replied, jokingly, Why,we 're going to hang you, you d--d Yankee. Vell, he said calmly, vatever is the rule. CGreat lcmghtevxj It may be that in all these apologetic remarks I am unnecessarily borrowing trouble, but I have always found that with the Dutch trouble is the only thing you can borrow unless you have got good security. CLaughte1'.D You have been kind enough to assign to me a toast which is specially pertinent to the occasion,

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1,59 o Horace, as there were brave men before Agamem- non, similarly there were martyrs to liberty be- fore the M ayflower 'appeared in Massachusetts Bay, Holland's struggle of eighty years' dura- tion against the mightiest power of that time, un- questionably made possible modern democracy., It lit a train of human revolt, which has slowly and increasingly blasted a pathway of freedgm for humanity through the granite rocks of Caesar- ism and feudalism. To 'the masses of men in every part of the world, struggling to escape from the house of .bondage and into the promised land, it has ever been as la pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Cflpplausej This memora- ble valor speaks to' us to-night out of the past, reminding us, with an eloquence unattainable by mortal man, of our debt to the dead and our duty to the unborn. Alkmaar, Haarlem, and Leyden -4how, supremely glorious in the annals of history! Could their walls repeat the dreadful sounds and sights which they have witnessed, what a tale of immeasurable sorrow would they not tell!, Mar- tyrdom hallows, and wherever a man has con- sciously laid down his life for a country that he loved or a cause in which he believed, that spot must be forever sacred, for it is a true Calvary, .and there is again repeated the infinite tragedy of the Cross. CAppZcmse.j Thorvaldsen has imperish- ably chiselled both the pathos and the grandeur of this truth in his Dying Lion, at Luzerne: r the head, so expressive of ability, the infinite pathos of the eye, and the thought of fidelity in the paw which tightly presses the shield of the Bourbons- all attest, in imperishable rock, the same imperish- able truth. The streets of Alkmaar, where the