PRESIDENT HAYES’ SPEECHES

September 30. I see President Hayes has come out West, passing quite informally from point to point, with his wife and a small cortege of big officers, receiving ovations, and making daily and sometimes double-daily addresses to the people. To these addresses—all impromptu, and some would call them ephemeral—I feel to devote a memorandum. They are shrewd, good-natur’d, face-to-face speeches, on easy topics not too deep; but they give me some revised ideas of oratory—of a new, opportune theory and practice of that art, quite changed from the classic rules, and adapted to our days, our occasions, to American democracy, and to the swarming populations of the West. I hear them criticized as wanting in dignity, but to me they are just what they should be, considering all the circumstances, who they come from, and who they are address’d to. Underneath, his objects are to compact and fraternize the states, encourage their materialistic and industrial development, soothe and expand their self-poise, and tie all and each with resistless double ties not only of inter-trade barter, but human comradeship.

From Kansas City I went on to St. Louis, where I remain’d nearly three months, with my brother T. J. W., and my dear nieces.