I said it was very strange, but the last thing that happened to me before leaving America was to receive the degree of A. M. from Cambridge, but I did not venture to aspire to the other one. And now the first thing that happens to me on my return is to receive your invitation. Gentlemen, ambition can no further go. [Laughter.] As Horace says, a man may change his skies, but not his disposition, and I wish to show you that I have not forgotten my manners while abroad; and, in this connection, that a good speech should have a short answer. A very excellent speech preceded mine. I have made my answer altogether too long. Thanking you from my heart, for your courteous kindness, I now take my seat. [Applause.] ABRAHAM LINCOLN CENTRAL IDEAS OF THE REPUBLIC [Fragment of a speech of Abraham Lincoln at the Republican banquet in Chicago, December 10, 1856. The rest of this speech, if it was ever reported, is presumably no longer extant, as it is not published in any collection of Lincoln's speeches.] GENTLEMEN:--We have another annual presidential message. Like a rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President felicitates himself hugely over the late presidential election. He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the people did it. He forgets that the "people," as he complacently calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the whole people by about four hundred thousand votes--one full tenth of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the "rebuke" may not be quite as durable as he seems to think--that the majority may not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority. The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the concrete, was duped by men who hate liberty every way. He is the cat's-paw. By much dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use. As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out of doors, "He's a shelled peascod." So far as the President charges us with a desire to "change the domestic institutions of existing States," and of "doing everything in our power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority," for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.