individual merit for whatever I may
have said upon that matter. I tell you that that was the calculation,
the best calculation of my own mind, that it was the simple result of
the deduction of my own reasoning [applause], and if you have shown me
gratitude on this matter I will not say that I have not felt in a
certain sense it was not deserved, from the motives I have alluded to.
And if, as some cynic has said, gratitude is nothing whatever but the
means of securing favors to come, I can assure you that you have
accomplished your object [laughter and applause], and if you have
desired that, in any means which Providence has placed in my power, in
any influence direct or indirect which I may exert, I shall speak as I
have spoken and think as I have thought of the United States of America,
you may be well sure that I will do so. [Applause.]

On another occasion when I have been kindly received, I have spoken of
my literary sympathy with this country. Every Englishman rightly looks
to this country as he would with a sense of appeal to posterity. He
feels that if he has said anything, if he has written anything, if he
has touched any chord, if he has struck even any verbal assurance that
pleases mankind, if you take it up you pass it on; it does not go from
tongue to tongue in the little distant Anglia of Europe.

I recognize that I have met in this country men whom I shall be glad to
meet anywhere and with whose familiarity I have been honored. And I
might say this, that if I were to compare the best men that I have met
here with the best men that I have known in Europe, I should say simply
this, that the men that I have found here seem to me as equal to the
circumstances in which they have been placed, as intelligent in all
their relations of life, as noble in their innermost impulses, as just
in their expressions, as any I have ever met with in my intercourse with
people in Europe. [Applause.] I have been honored with the familiarity
of many distinguished men, I have been received with great kindness by
your intelligent and able President. I had the fortune, the other day,
to sit by the deathbed of that amiable, honest man, your Vice-President
[Henry Wilson], in the Capitol at Washington, dying under the portrait
of Jefferson. I have seen some of your able men with whom I have been
intimate in Europe, and one whom you will allow me to mention above all
others, a man whose career I witnessed during the great and stormy