squeezed him out of his cabbage-patch, and upon
it he built his warehouse and his residence. He found this city laid out
in a beautiful labyrinth of cow-patches, with the inhabitants and the
houses all standing with their gable-ends to the street, and he turned
them all to the avenue, and made New York a parallelogram of palaces;
and he has multiplied to such an extent that now he fills every nook of
our great State, and we recognize here to-night that, with no tariff,
and free trade between New England and New York, the native specimen is
an improvement upon the imported article. Gentlemen, I beg leave to say,
as a native New Yorker of many generations, that by the influence, the
hospitality, the liberal spirit, and the cosmopolitan influences of this
great State, from the unlovable Puritan of two hundred years ago you
have become the most agreeable and companionable of men.

New York to-day, the Empire State of all the great States of the
Commonwealth, brings in through her grand avenue to the sea eighty per
cent. of all the imports, and sends forth a majority of all the exports,
of the Republic. She collects and pays four-fifths of the taxes which
carry on the government of the country. In the close competition to
secure the great Western commerce which is to-day feeding the world and
seeking an outlet along three thousand miles of coast, she holds by her
commercial prestige and enterprise more than all the ports from New
Orleans to Portland combined. Let us, whether native or adopted New
Yorkers, be true to the past, to the present, to the future, of this
commercial and financial metropolis. Let us enlarge our terminal
facilities and bring the rail and the steamship close together. Let us
do away with the burdens that make New York the dearest, and make her
the cheapest, port on the continent; and let us impress our commercial
ideas upon the national legislature, so that the navigation laws, which
have driven the merchant marine of the Republic from the seas, shall be
repealed, and the breezes of every clime shall unfurl, and the waves of
every sea reflect, the flag of the Republic.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Speech of Chauncey M. Depew at the seventy-fourth anniversary
banquet of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22,
1879.

MEN OF LETTERS

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE

Sir Francis Grant, Your Royal Highness, My Lords, and Gentlemen:--While
I feel most keenly the honor which you confer upon me