y carried through life, their taste had
not been highly cultivated. [Laughter.]

I dread this function which I am now attempting to discharge more than
any other that confronts me in life. The after-dinner speaker, unlike
the poet, is not born,--he is made. I am frequently compelled to meet in
disastrous competition about some dinner-table gentlemen who have
already had their speeches set up in the newspaper offices. They are
given to you as if they were fresh from the lip; you are served with
what they would have you believe to be "impromptu boned turkey;" and
yet, if you could see into the recesses of their intellectual kitchen,
you would see the days of careful preparation which have been given to
these spontaneous utterances. The after-dinner speaker needs to find
somewhere some unworked joker's quarry, where some jokes have been left
without a label on them; he needs to acquire the art of seeming to
pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech, as by the
wayside, some flower of rhetoric. He seems to have passed it and to have
plucked it casually,--but it is a boutonniere with tin foil round it.
[Laughter.] You can see, upon close inspection, the mark of the planer
on his well-turned sentences. Now, the competition with gentlemen who
are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the
impulse of the occasion. It is either incapacity or downright laziness
that has kept me from competing in the field I have described.

It occurred to me to-day to inquire why you had to associate six States
in order to get up a respectable Society. My friend Halstead [Murat
Halstead] and I have no such trouble. We are Ohio-born, and we do not
need to associate any other State in order to get up a good Society,
wherever there is a civil list of the Government. If you would adopt the
liberal charter method of the Ohio Society, I have no doubt you could
subdivide yourselves into six good societies. The Ohio Society admits to
membership everybody who has lived voluntarily six months in Ohio. No
involuntary resident is permitted to come in. [Laughter.]

But the association of these States and the name "New England" is a part
of an old classification of the States which we used to find in the
geography, and all of that classification has gone except New England
and the South. "The West" has disappeared and "the Middle States" cannot
be identified. Where is "the West"? Why, just now it is at the point of
that lo