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content with being the transporters of the people from their homes to their places of business, and from their places of business back to their homes again, they have become the purveyors of public amusement. They do not offer you a chromo with a street car ride; but they do in the summer time offer you, at the end of their line, an operatic or a dramatic performance, music in all its varieties, from the oratorio of Handel or Bach, to the simple balladry of the negro minstrel, and the drama in all its varieties, tragedy, melodrama, comedy and farce. But if you want to see the very best that these resorts of the street railway people have to present, you want to go, not to the regular entertainments, but to the rehearsals in the morning! (Laughter.) Go out on the Citizens' Line to King's Highway, and you may find our friend, Captain McCulloch, beating time for the music of the chorus, it may be in the opera of Lohengrin or in that of Olivette-(laughter)-it doesn't make much difference which, and I doubt if the Captain would himself know which. (Laughter.) Or if you are not inclined to that, go out to Forest Park Highlands, and there you will see my friend, Ed. Whitaker, his usually smiling face puckered into gravity, as he listens to the recitation by the heavy tragedian of the soliloquy in Richard III. (Laughter and applause). But if you want to make sure to find the right man in the right place, go to Koerner's Garden, and see John Scullin at the head of the procession in the sprightly march of the ballet du corps. (Great laughter and applause.)

If there is not some serious danger lurking under these new enterprises of our street railway brethren, I know of nothing to apprehend from the utmost extension and application of their systems. We speak of the present civilization as a material one, as being commercial in every respect, with so much of the evils of materialism and of the commercial spirit; but one thing characterizes commercial enterprise in all its phases, and that is, it cannot long be continued, it cannot be successful, unless it is productive of good and of gain to all parties to it. (Applause.) It is that which redeems material enterprise. (Applause.) You may get what franchises you will from the city of St. Louis. They are in themselves not worth one penny to the grantees. You may go on and cover the streets of this city with tracks of iron and steel, but these tracks are of no value in themselves. You may put the best equipped cars which the ingenuity of the modern mind has been able to construct upon these tracks, but they in turn are worth nothing. It is not until they are combined, franchises, tracks and cars, and used for the service of the public that they become of any value whatever, and they are made valuable to their owners precisely in the measure in which they are made serviceable to the public. (Great applause.) The managers can get money from the people only by giving something to the people which is worth more to them than that money. To get that money the equipment is continually improved, and the lines are continually extended, and the public, year by year, are given a greater and a better service, not from motives of philanthropy, but from commercial neces

sity. There is no menace to the public welfare in the growth of our material enterprises, for that growth is itself impossible except as it expresses, accompanies, aids, and is aided by, the increased and increasing prosperity of the great masses of the people. (Great applause.)

44
TOAST: THE PRESS," RESPONDED TO BY
MR. WILLIAM M. REEDY.

The Toastmaster: Two Irishmen saw a Hebrew inscription upon the gate of a Jewish cemetery, and one said, "Pat, can you spell that?" Says Pat, "I cannot; but if I had my violin, I could play it." On the subject of this next toast one may spell, but he cannot play; it refers to our dearest foes and our warmest allies "The Press," which is the fifth regular toast of the evening, to be responded to by Mr. William Marion Reedy.

Mr. Reedy: Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen :- Critics, they say, are usually people who have made failures in everything else, and more particularly in those things which they presume to criticise. If this be true a better selection could not have been made for a response to this toast, than yours trolley! I speak to you as one who is held in the hollow of the hand of a receiver, duly appointed by the court. (Laughter.) Having been an accessory before the fact in the achievement of a failure, I may read my title clear to an authority upon the subject of how not to do it in journalism.

It were presumptuous in so small an individual as I to speak for the Press. It speaks for itself every day, every hour in the day, and in extra editions after dark. (Laughter.) To the members of no other profession is it given to indulge themselves in the doffing of their hats at the mention of their own names; to the members of no other profession is it allowed that they shall pass their moments of relaxation from the arduous task of molding public opinion in throwing bouquets at themselves. The delicate modesty of the Press is the dear delight of every one. The Press is great. We have its own word for it. (Laughter.) Dare to doubt it, and there is a trained band of affidavit makers at hand ready to back up its claim to power, and purity, and all the advertising. (Laughter.) Dare to doubt the power of the Press, and you are condemned to roasting and ridicule! Dare to doubt the power of the Press, and you shall realize for once the aspiration of the inspired plough-boy-you will see yourself as others see you! As one of the ink stained, I am in talking upon this subject, and saying what I think, taking full share for what may be blameworthy therein, and claiming no part in what may be said in the way of praise.

The Press has filled the world with light. Gutenberg was the Lincoln of the mind. He struck from it its last shackle. The first type

that was cast was the bullet that shall find the heart of the last tyrant that shall curse mankind. (Applause.) The first printing press was the Magna Charta of humanity. Printer's ink is the magic mirror in which we can read the past, and which enables us, from that past, to frame a future that shall give to man a maximum of happiness and a minimum of pain. When the first type was cast, William Shakespeare was born and Liberty found voice. The rumble of the printing press shook from his dais the great god Sham, and enthroned thereon Truth; the Truth that sets us free; the Truth that questions earth and sky as to whence and whither, how and why; the Truth that shows in the success and failure of to-day the way in which we may make for those who follow us a brighter and purer to-morrow. (Applause.) Printing presses made knowledge the property of all, and "knowledge is power." Printing placed power in the hands of the people.

When man began to perpetuate his thought through the medium of type and paper, he took into his own hands the making of his own immortality. In books, men gave of themselves for the betterment of others the best thought of their brain, the saddest and sweetest singing of their hearts; thought and song and dream that shall live in other minds and hearts when their mouths are stopped with dust. In books men have enshrined their souls, and from them we may read the lesson that all striving is not in vain, that even the failures will help us on the upward way. Books have condensed and co-ordinated the experience of mankind, and it is only through experience that mankind can learn. Printing and progress began simultaneously. Books at one time were burned, as were their makers, by the erstwhile possessors of knowledge; but the books that were not burned taught us still the glory of this world. It was through printing that a mighty god was robbed of the mantle of terrors put upon him by man, and through printing was given us the God of Love.

From the book sprung in course of time the newspaper, the newspaper, embodied conscience of the time, the modern Argus with myriad eyes, the blabber of all secrets, the destroyer of all privacy, at once the Bible and the curse of our Democracy! There is much to be said in favor of the newspaper, and the newspapers say it, always! It is mainly through the newspapers that liberty has broadened down from precedent to precedent. By the aid of the newspaper, in a former time, the masses have wrung from the classes all their rights. The newspaper was the petard upon which privilege was almost wholly hoisted over this world. There are no privileges any more, save those of the Press. It has passes to everything, everywhere. (Laughter.) It is omnipotent. It knows more law than the lawyers, more business than the business man, more about street railways than the managers of the railways themselves. If you see it in the Daily Blanket, it's so; and if is not so, it ought to be. (Applause.)

But, there is another side to the newspaper, and one of which the newspapers say but little. Have you ever noticed that the newspaper,

in its capacity as a money making enterprise, has discovered how profitable is virtue? How horribly indecent one can be in the cause of virtue, and how the indecency is profitable is shown in the greatest newspaper successes of the United States to-day! The newspaper has made a Snobocracy in this country. It is through the newspapers that there has been encouraged a worship of the rich. It is through the newspaper at the same time that a Mobocracy has been created, by pandering to the prejudices of the unsuccessful and ambitious, and by exciting, with false sympathy, the miseries of the unfortunate! The newspaper has defiled public life more than any other institution in America. It deals with the inanities, the follies, the sin, and shame, and sorrows of the day. Have you ever thought how often it is that the item which is the piece de resistance of the daily newspaper is but the record of some man's sin, and misfortune, and failure? How often do we see the leading news item in a paper dealing with the discovery of "a good deed in a wicked world?" It is very rare, indeed. How much the newspaper finds to criticise, how much to condemn, how easy it is for the editor to drift in the line of weakest resistance, and write the easiest form of literary expressioninvective? Thersites, the deformed and scurrilous Grecian is, or ought to be, his patron saint. The newspaper demagogue is a subject or an object to which I would allude briefly. It is through the newspaper that all the enmity against wealth has been created. It is through the expressions of the newspaper pandering to the unrest and dissatisfaction of this country that our institutions are now in danger. The newspaper panders to anarchy by showing us the world at its worst instead of at its best. (Applause.) The defense of the newspapers to every charge against them is that they give the people what they want. Do you believe it? Take the freak page in the Sunday paper, for instance; behold there things penned and penciled with which in comparison the strange fantasms of a drunkard's brain are conceptions of ineffable beauty. Do you believe the public is hungering for the details of a bride's lingerie at a fashionable wedding? Do you believe the public is eager to know the diameter of a debutante's garter, and does the new womanism craze, itself an invention of the newspaper press, justify the taking of good women from the sanctity, serenity and security of the home into the public prints, where they are scanned by the denizens of the slums, where they are discussed in language which the panderers of Rome might have used in descanting upon the allurements of the "ladies" of Rome's lupanars? Do the people wish every detail of private life to be laid bare? Do they revel in scandal? Ah! no, not when it is brought home to their own loved ones! (Great applause.)

The best newspaper is not necessarily the newspaper with the largest circulation. The best newspaper is that paper which reaches the largest number of the best people. (Applause). The best newspaper is that which does a little something for literature, for art, for song, for living in harmony with sane thought, and with now and then an attempt to realize an inspiring dream. If the people want all this ignorance and mendacity,

all this pandering to the most depraved and brutal instincts of the mul titude, are not journalists above the herd of common men, and have they not the courage to set their faces in an opposite direction? Do not journalists know that there is a fascination in evil; that there is a hypnotism of the hideous which tends to reproduce in every community the crimes which are daily portrayed in the Press? Do these journalists, not newspaper men, not know that there is a certain tendency on the part of the public to deal in frivolous things, to go after false gods, to indulge their passions and their little inanities; and is it not their duty, in their self-styled capacity of public educators, instead of catering and pandering to all that, to stand as a bulwark against the rising tide of moral and political insanity? (Great applause.)

Doubtless, all newspapers are not as bad as others; some are worse; but to make my speech brief, I would say that I think this life would be a much sweeter one if the newspapers would tell us more of how good we might be and less of how bad we are (applause); if they would only be serious once in a while about something other than the receipts of the business office; if they would only lead us out of ourselves, away from the strife and clamor, and muck and mud of life, upward and onward to the land of the ideal, "over the hills and far away!" I thank you, ladies and gentlemen. (Great applause.)

[In answer to a compliment upon his speech, Mr. Reedy wrote: "Your compliments on the speech are appreciated. But who could not speak well at such a banquet! I never saw as pretty a banquet, and I have seen many in my time. If I contributed in the least to the enjoyableness of the occasion, I am greatly pleased."]

TOAST: "THE TECHNICAL PRESS," RESPONDED TO BY

MR. EDWARD E. HIGGINS.

The Toastmaster: One other has been added to the list of toasts. It is the toast of "The Technical Press," which will be responded to by a gentleman who is versed in statistics and the cost of construction, maintenance of way, etc., Mr. E. E. Higgins. You are to keep two things in mind in listening to anything with reference to figures. First, that when Iky said "Fader, how many does two and two make?" the old man replied, “Iky, vat you goin', to buy or sell ?" Secondly, that thought which emanated from some bright mind-"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics!" (Laughter.)

Mr. Higgins: Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen :-There are, I suppose, about ten or fifteen representatives of the technical press present at this banquet or in attendance at the convention. All of them, with the single exception of myself, are possessed of rare oratorical abilities, of a brilliancy of diction and a fertility of inven

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