That most moving account of Lincoln’s simple eloquence at the graves of Gettysburg is a most touching episode. The thousands listening to him never uttered a sound. There was a dead silence, when he stopped speaking. He left thinking himself a failure. It was the success of his life. A great orator just before him had moved the multitude to cheer unboundedly! but after Lincoln their feelings made them dumb. While on personalities, I should like to say a little on one of the best friends I ever had and in my opinion the greatest of all journalists. Lord Morley once told me that he had never known the equal of W. T. Stead in his astounding gift of catching the popular feeling. He was absolute integrity and he feared no man. I myself have heard him tackle a Prime Minister like a terrier a rat. I have known him go to a packed meeting and scathe the whole mob of them. He never thought of money; he only thought of truth. He might have been a rich man if he hadn’t told the truth. I know it. When he was over sixty he performed a journalistic feat that was wondrous. By King Edward’s positive orders a cordon was arranged round the battle-cruiser “Indomitable,” arriving late at night at Cowes with the Prince of Wales on board, to prevent the Press being a nuisance. Stead, in a small boat, dropped down with the tide from ahead and swarmed up a rope ladder under the bows, about 30 feet high and then along a sort of greasy pole, known to sailors as the lower boom, talked to one of the Officers, who naturally supposed he couldn’t be there without permission; and the _Daily Mail_ the next morning had the most perfect digest I have ever read of perhaps one of the most wonderful passages ever made. This big battle cruiser encumbered with the heaviest guns known, and with hundreds and hundreds of tons of armour on her side, beat the “Mauretania,” the greyhound of the seas, built of gingerbread, carrying no cargo, and shaped for no other purpose than for speed and luxury. Of course no other paper had a word. Stead always told me he would die in his boots. Strife was his portion, he said. I am not sure that my friend Arnold White would not have shot him at sight in the Boer War. Stead was a pro-Boer, and so was I. I simply loved Botha, and Botha gave me great words. He said: “English was the business language of the globe”--that’s good! Of course every genius has a strain of queerness. Does not the poet say: “Great wits to madness often are allied?” I remember a book which had a great circulation, entitled “The Insanity of Genius.” I very nearly wrote a letter to _The Times_ only I was afraid they might think _me_ mad, and I was afraid that Admiral Fitzgerald might not think me modest (see his letter in _The Times_ of Sept. 8th, 1919). This was my letter to _The Times_:-- “Genius is not insanity, it only means the man is before his time. That’s all.” That was the whole of the letter.