stions of our future relations
with one another are questions of special moment just now. You are at a
parting of the ways. It would be presumptuous, as it would be unwise, in
me to forecast or to attempt to forecast the decision at which you will
arrive on questions that have yet to be solved. But, putting these
questions that remain for solution aside, and dealing only with the
events as they are now known and fixed, it is impossible not to feel
that this year marks an epoch in the history of the United States, and
the relation which the United States is to bear to Great Britain, and
the relation which Great Britain is to bear to the United States; and
the spirit which is to animate those two peoples becomes of more
importance than it ever has been before. I rejoice to see those flags
joined as they are around this room to-night. [Applause.] God grant that
they may never be flaunted in defiance of one another. [Applause.] I
rejoice to see them united in concord, not in any spirit of arrogance
toward other peoples, not as desiring to infringe the rights of any
other power, but because I see in that union a real safeguard for the
maintenance of peace in the world [applause], and because I see more
than that--I see the surest guaranty of an extended reign of liberty and
justice. [Prolonged applause.]

GEORGE STILLMAN HILLARD

THE INFLUENCE OF MEN OF GENIUS

[Speech of George S. Hillard at the banquet given to Charles Dickens by
the "Young Men of Boston," February 1, 1842. The company consisted of
about two hundred, among whom were George Bancroft, Washington Allston
and Oliver Wendell Holmes.]

MR. PRESIDENT:--Our meeting together this evening is one of the
agreeable results of the sympathy established between two great and
distant nations by a common language and a common literature. We are
paying our cheerful tribute of gratitude and admiration to one who,
though heretofore a stranger to us in person, has made his image a
familiar presence in innumerable hearts, who has brightened the sunshine
of many a happy, and cheered the gloom of many a desponding breast,
whose works have been companions to the solitary and a cordial in the
sick man's chamber, and whose natural pathos and thoughtful humor,
flowing from a genius as healthy as it is inventive, have drawn more
closely the ties which bind man to his brother man, and have given us a
new sense of the wickedness of injustice, the deformity of selfishn