Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
History
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Speeches, addresses, etc.
Permit me another incident and this not from New York, but Philadelphia.
One of the Copes had but just written his check for $50 for some local
charity, when a messenger announced the wreck of an East Indiaman
belonging to the firm, and that the ship and cargo were a total loss.
Another check for $500 was substituted at once, and given to the agent
of the hospital with the remark: "What I have God gave me, and before it
all goes, I had better put some of it where it can never be lost."
[Applause.]
Such illustrations as these are not infrequent in the biographies of
those noble men who in days gone by as well as in our own times, have
never divorced truth from trade, but have always reverenced the sacred
relations. I dare venture the remark that the prosperity of a nation is
more largely dependent upon the probity of its merchants than upon any
other one class of men. [Applause.] This because of their numbers, their
influence over so many who are subject to them in business, and their
close relation to, and important control over, the financial interests
of the country.
What a wide area of opportunity is afforded in the counting-room, where
so many students of trade are preparing for the uncertain future!
Accept, I beseech you, the responsibility of moulding the characters of
your young men and so prepare a generation of merchants who shall know
of nothing but honesty and honor, and who will cherish nobility of
sentiment in all their business transactions. [Applause.]
And can you not help the world abroad as well as at home? I believe that
merchants engaged in commerce with foreign nations, have it within the
scope and purview of their business relations to do as much for the
propagation of Christian truth as the Church itself. If your ventures
are intrusted to the direction of men of character; if your agents are
men who recognize in practice the morals of the religion they profess,
you will not only not negative as now, alas! but too often the efforts
of the Church's envoys, by the frequent violations of Christian law, on
the part of those who propose to be governed by it; but through the
illustrations you can send out of Christian consistency--by the living
representatives of our higher civilization, which you can furnish to
remote nations, to say nothing of the voluntary agency in scattering the
printed powers of our faith in all quarters of the globe, how much may
not be accomplished in this and in other ways by your men and your
ships--Trade thus travelling round the world with Truth by her side,
helping each other and healing the nations. [Applause.]
WINFIELD SCOTT SCHLEY
THE NAVY IN PEACE AND IN WAR
[Speech of Winfield S. Schley at the eighteenth annual dinner of
the New England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22,
1898. The President, Stephen W. Dana, presented Admiral Schley in
these words: "Admiral Schley needs no introduction from me--he
speaks for himself."]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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