Royal Literary and Scientific Society Dinner, Ottawa
I never feel wholly at home and equal to the occasion except when I am to respond for the royal family or the President of the United States. But I am full of serenity, courage and confidence then, because I know by experience that I can drink standing and “in silence” just as long as anybody wants me to. Sometimes I have gone on responding to those toasts with mute and diligent enthusiasm until I have become an embarrassment, and people have requested me to sit down and rest myself. But responding by speech is a sore trial to me. The list of toasts being always the same, one is always so apt to forget and say something that has already been said at some other banquet some time or other. For instance, you take the toast to—well, take any toast in the regulation lot, and you won’t get far in your speech before you notice that everything you are saying is old; not only old, but stale; and not only stale, but rancid. At any rate, that is my experience. There are gifted men who have the faculty of saying an old thing in a new and happy way—they rub the old Aladdin lamp and bring forth the smoke and thunder, the giants and genii, the pomp and pageantry of all the wide and secret realms of enchantment—and these men are the saviors of the banquet; but for them it must have gone silent, as Carlyle would say, generations ago, and ceased from among the world’s occasions and industries. But I cannot borrow their trick; I do not know the mystery of how to rub the old lamp the right way.
And so it has seemed to me that for the behoof of my sort and kind, the toast list ought to be reconstructed. We ought to have some of the old themes knocked out of it and a new one or two inserted in their places. There are plenty of new subjects, if we would only look around. And plenty of old ones, too, that have not been touched. There is Adam, for instance. Who ever talks about Adam at a banquet? All sorts of recent and ephemeral celebrities are held up and glorified on such occasions, but who ever says a good word for Adam? Yet why is he neglected, why is he ignored in this offensive way—can you tell me that? What has he done, that we let banquet after banquet go on, and never give him a lift? Considering what we and the whole world owe him, he ought to be in the list—yes, and he ought to be away up high in the list, too. He ought to take precedence of the Press; yes, and the Army and Navy; and Literature; and the Day we Celebrate; and pretty much everything else. In the United States he ought to be at the very top—he ought to take precedence of the President; and even in the loyalest monarchy he ought at least to come right after the royal family. And be “drunk in silence and standing,” too. It is his right; and for one, I propose to stick here and drink him in silence and standing till I can’t tell a ministering angel from a tax collector. This neglect has been going on too long. You always place Woman at the bottom of the toast list; it is but simple justice to place Adam at the top of it—for if it had not been for the help of these two, where would you and your banquets be?—answer me that. You must excuse me for losing my temper and carrying on in this way; and in truth I would not do it if it were almost anybody but Adam; but I am of a narrow and clannish disposition, and I never can see a relative of mine misused without going into a passion. It is no trick for people with plenty of celebrated kin to keep cool when their folk are misused; but Adam is the only solitary celebrity in our family, and the man that misuses him has got to walk over my dead body—or go around, that is all there is to that. That is the way I feel about Adam. Years ago when I went around trying to collect subscriptions to build a monument to him, there wasn’t a man that would give a cent; and generally they lost their temper because I interrupted their business; and they drove me away, and said they didn’t care Adam for Adam—and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they got the emphasis on the wrong end of the word. Such is the influence of passion on a man’s pronunciation. I tried Congress. Congress wouldn’t build the monument. They wouldn’t sell me the Washington monument, they wouldn’t lend it to me temporarily while I could look around for another. I am negotiating for that Bastile yonder by the public square in Montreal, but they say they want to finish it first. Of course that ends the project, because there couldn’t be any use of a monument after the man was forgotten. It is a pity, because I thought Adam might have pleasant associations with that building—he must have seen it in his time. But he shall have a monument yet, even if it be only a grateful place in the list of toasts; for to him we owe the two things which are most precious—life, and death. Life, which the young, the hopeful, the undefeated hold above all wealth and all honors; and death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old, and weary, and broken of heart, whose burdens be heavy upon them, and who would lie down and be at rest.
I would like to see the toast list reconstructed, for it seems to me a needed reform; and as a beginning in this direction, if I can meet with a second, I beg to nominate Adam. I am not actuated by family considerations. It is a thing which I would do for any other member of our family, or anybody else’s, if I could honestly feel that he deserved it. But I do not. If I seem to be always trying to shove Adam into prominence, I can say sincerely that it is solely because of my admiration of him as a man who was a good citizen at a time when it was difficult to be a good citizen; a good husband at a time when he was not married; a good father at a time when he had to guess his way, having never been young himself; and would have been a good son if he had had the chance. He could have been governor if he had wanted to; he could have been postmaster general, speaker of the House, he could have been anything he chose, if he had been willing to put himself up and stand a canvass. Yet he lived and died a private citizen, without a handle to his name, and he comes down to us as plain simple Adam, and nothing more—a man who could have elected himself Major General Adam or anything else as easy as rolling off a log. I stand up for him on account of his sterling private virtues, as a man and a citizen—as an inventor—inventor of life, and death, and sin, and the fashions—and not because he simply happens to be kin to me.
May 23, 1883