y his views, would
rather that any other man should have been elected as Chief Magistrate
than Mr. John Kelly. Mr. Kelly, if I interpret aright his public
utterances, would prefer any other man for the Governor of New York than
Lucius Robinson, and therefore, in one of the most heated controversies
we have ever had, we elected a Governor by unanimous consent or assent
in Alonzo B. Cornell. Horace Greeley once said to me, as we were
returning from a State convention where he had been a candidate, but the
delegates had failed to nominate the fittest man for the place: "I don't
see why any man wants to be Governor of the State of New York, for there
is no one living who can name the last ten Governors on a moment's
notice." But tho there have been Governors and Governors, there is, when
the gubernatorial office is mentioned, one figure that strides down the
centuries before all the rest; that is the old Dutch Governor of New
York, with his wooden leg--Peter Stuyvesant. There have been heroines,
too, who have aroused the poetry and eloquence of all times, but none
who have about them the substantial aroma of the Dutch heroine, Anneke
Jans.

It is within the memory of men now living when the whole of American
literature was dismissed with the sneer of the _Edinburgh Review_, "Who
reads an American book?" But out of the American wilderness a broad
avenue to the highway which has been trod by the genius of all times in
its march to fame was opened by Washington Irving, and in his footsteps
have followed the men who are read of all the world, and who will
receive the highest tributes in all times--Longfellow, and Whittier, and
Hawthorne and Prescott.

New York is not only imperial in all those material results which
constitute and form the greatest commonwealth in this constellation of
commonwealths, but in our political system she has become the arbiter of
our national destiny. As goes New York so goes the Union, and her voice
indicates that the next President will be a man with New England blood
in his veins or a representative of New England ideas.

And for the gentleman who will not be elected I have a Yankee story. In
the Berkshire hills there was a funeral, and as they gathered in the
little parlor there came the typical New England female, who mingles
curiosity with her sympathy, and as she glanced around the darkened room
she said to the bereaved widow, "When did you get that new eight-day
clock?" "We ain't got no ne