SPEECH AT THE OPENING OF A FAIR. 315

while to others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of these things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names-liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty, and precisely the same. difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.

REPLY TO A COMMITTEE FROM THE METHODIST CONFERENCE,

MAY 14, 1864.

NOBLY sustained as the Government has been by all the churches, I would utter nothing which might in the least appear invidious against any. Yet without this it may fairly be said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, not less devoted than the rest, is, by its greater numbers, the most important of all. It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field. more nurses to the hospitals, and more prayers to heaven than any. God bless the Methodist Church! bless all the churches, and blessed be God! who in this our great trial giveth us the churches.

WILLIAM C. MOREY.

317

HE

E was the true American, at one with the people in his origin, his simplicity of character, his rugged manliness, and his stern devotion to the cause of civil liberty. While he lived, he was the friend of his country, and when he died the sense of personal bereavement darkened every American home. In the supreme crisis of American history, his faith in the ultimate triumph of popular institutions never failed him. By that faith he saved the nation, he widened the bounds of human freedom, and he rendered forever sacred those principles of government which rest upon justice and the equal rights of man. His real epitaph cannot be written. It has received its truest expression in the silent memory of those great historic deeds with which his name is associated, and which can never, as long as liberty is cherished by man, be effaced from the records of time.

Williams. C. Mory

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER, 1880.

RESPONSE TO A

DELEGATION OF THE

NATIONAL UNION LEAGUE.

I CAN only say, in response to the kind remarks of your chairman, as I suppose, that I am very grateful for the renewed confidence which has been accorded to me both by the Convention and by the National League. I am not insensible at all to the personal compliment there is in this, and yet I do not allow myself to believe that any but a small portion of it is to be appropriated as a personal compliment; that really the Convention and the Union League assembled with a higher view—that of taking care of the interests of the country for the present and the great future-and that the part I am entitled to appropriate as a compliment is only that part which I may lay hold of as being the opinion of the Convention and of the League, that I am not entirely unworthy to be intrusted with the place which I have occupied for the last three years. But I do not allow myself to suppose that either the Convention or the League have concluded to decide that I am either the greatest or best man in America, but rather they have concluded that it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap.

P. T. BARNUM.

319

A

BRAHAM LINCOLN'S cheerfulness and wit were invaluable to him in the trying years of our civil Cheerfulness to a good man or woman is always a mighty sustaining power. Mr. Lincoln's unwavering faith that good would finally overcome evil buoyed his spirits through the darkest hours. Of Mr. Lincoln's inflexible honesty of purpose, there is but one opinion throughout the world. He was a noble, whole-souled, tender-hearted man. He was a model President of this model Republic. His fame is justly immortal.

BRIDGEPORT, 1880.

г. Волинь