ers of the occasion that had
brought them together and pronounced a glowing eulogy upon the game and
its beauties and upon the players that had journeyed around the world to
introduce it in foreign climes, and then called upon Mayor Cleveland of
New Jersey, whose witty remarks excited constant laughter, and who wound
up by welcoming us home in the name of the 20,000 residents of the
little city across the river. Mayor Alfred Chapin of Brooklyn followed
in a brief and laughter-provoking address, after which Chauncey M. Depew
arose amid enthusiastic cheering and spoke as follows:

"Representing, as I do, probably more than any other human being, the
whole of the American people who were deprived, by a convention that did
not understand its duty, of putting me where I belong; and representing,
as I do, by birth and opportunity, all the nationalities on the globe, I
feel that I have been properly selected to give you the welcome of the
world. I am just now arranging and preparing a Centennial oration which
I hope may, and fear may not, meet all the possibilities of the 30th of
April in presenting the majesty of that which created the government
which we boast of and the land and country of which we are proud, but I
feel that that oration is of no importance compared with the event of
this evening. Washington never saw a base-ball game; Madison wrote the
Constitution of the United States, and died without seeing one;
Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and yet his
monument has no tribute of this kind upon it. Hamilton, the most
marvelous and creative genius, made constitutions, built up systems and
created institutions, and yet never witnessed a base-ball game. I feel
as I stand here that all the men that have ever lived and achieved
success in this world have died in vain. I am competent to pay that
tribute, because I never played a game in my life, and I never saw it
but once, and then did not understand it. A philosopher whom I always
read with interest, because his abstractions sometimes approach the
truth, wrote an article of some acumen several years ago, in which he
said that you could mark the march of civilization and rise of liberty
and its decadence by the interest which the nations took in pugilism.
The nations of the earth which submit to the most grinding of despotisms
have no pugilists. The nations of Europe which have never risen in their
boasted establishments to a full comprehension