The war is over; the very subject is hackneyed; it is a
tale that is told, and commerce and enlightened self-interest have
obliterated all lines. 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.
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