u have the tallest monument,
you have the biggest waterfall, you have the highest tariff of any
country in the world. [Great laughter and applause.] I would tell you
that the last census showed that you had gained so many millions, as if
the rabbits did not beat us in that way of multiplication, as if it
counted for anything! It seems to me that what we make of our several
millions is the vital question for us.

I was very much interested in what Prof. Stanley Hall said. I am heretic
enough to have doubted whether our common schools are the panacea we
have been inclined to think them. I was exceedingly interested in what
he said about the education which a boy gained on the hills here. It
seems to me we are going to fall back into the easy belief that because
our common schools teach more than they used--and in my opinion much
more than they ought--we can dispense with the training of the
household. When Mr. Harrison [J. P. Harrison, author of "Some Dangerous
Tendencies in American Life," one of the preceding speakers] was telling
us of the men who were obliged to labor without hope from one end of the
day to the other, and one end of the year to the other, he added, what
is quite true--that, perhaps, after all, they are happier than that very
large class of men who have leisure without culture, and whose sole
occupation is either the killing of game or the killing of time--that is
the killing of the most valuable possession that we have.

But I will not detain you any longer for, as I did say, I did not come
here to make a speech, and I did not know what I was going to say when I
came. I generally, on such occasions, trust to the spur of the moment,
and sometimes the moment forgets its spur. [Laughter and applause.]

* * * * *

LITERATURE

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the annual banquet of the Royal
Academy, London, May 1, 1886, in response to the toast, "The Interests
of Literature." The President of the Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton,
said, in introducing Mr. Lowell: "In the name of letters, of English
letters, in the broadest sense, I rejoice to turn, not for the first
time at this table, to one who counts among the very foremost of their
representatives. As a poet richly endowed, as a critic most subtle and
penetrating, among humorists the most genial, as a speaker not
surpassed--who shall more fittingly rise in the name of Literature
than Mr. Russell