es. And yet you must forgive us if, before the
account is finally closed, and the dead and the woe and the tears are
balanced by all the blessings of a reunited country, some of us still
listen for a voice we have not yet heard; if we wait for some Southern
leader to tell us that renewed participation in the management of the
affairs of this nation carries with it the admission that the question
of the right of secession is settled, not because the South was
vanquished, but because the doctrine was and is wrong, forever wrong.
[Great applause.]

We are a plain people, too, and live far away. We find all the
excitement we need in the two great political parties, and rather look
upon the talk of anybody in either party being better than his party, as
a sort of cant. The hypercritical faculty has not reached us yet, and
we leave to you of the East the exclusive occupancy of the raised dais
upon which it seems necessary for the independent voter to stand while
he is counted. [Applause and laughter.]

We are provincial; we have no distinctive literature and no great poets;
our leading personage abroad of late seems to be the Honorable "Buffalo
Bill" [laughter], and we use our adjectives so recklessly that the
polite badinage indulged in toward each other by your New York editors
to us seems tame and spiritless. In mental achievement we may not have
fully acquired the use of the fork, and are "but in the gristle and not
yet hardened into the bone of manhood." We stand toward the East
somewhat as country to city cousins; about as New to Old England, only
we don't feel half so badly about it, and on the whole are rather
pleased with ourselves. [Laughter.] There is not in the whole broad West
a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is not within reach
of it. With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating
and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time
to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All this may not be aesthetic,
but it is virile, and it leads up and not down. Great poets, and those
who so touch the hearts of men that the vibration goes down the ages,
must often find their inspiration when wealth brings leisure to a class,
or must have "learned in suffering what they teach in song." We can wait
for our inspired ones; when they come, the work of this generation,
obscure and commonplace, will have paved the way for them; the general
intelligence diffused in this half c