British schools, I was there to respond to a toast of some kind or other, and I did then what I have been in the habit of doing, from a selfish motive, for a long time, and that is, I got myself placed No, 3 in the list of speakers--then you get home early.
I had to go five miles up-river, and had to catch a, particular train or not get there. But see the magnanimity which is born in me, which I have cultivated all my life. A very famous and very great British clergyman came to me presently, and he said: "I am away down in the list; I have got to catch a certain train this Saturday night; if I don't catch that train I shall be carried beyond midnight and break the Sabbath. Won't you change places with me?" I said: "Certainly I will." I did it at once. Now, see what happened.
Talk about Sir Mortimer Durand's sufferings for a single night! I have suffered ever since because I saved that gentleman from breaking the Sabbath-yes, saved him. I took his place, but I lost my train, and it was I who broke the Sabbath. Up to that time I never had broken the Sabbath in my life, and from that day to this I never have kept it.
Oh! I am learning much here to-night. I find I didn't know anything about the American Society--that is, I didn't know its chief virtue. I didn't know its chief virtue until his Excellency our Ambassador revealed it--I may say, exposed it. I was intending to go home on the 13th of this month, but I look upon that in a different light now. I am going to stay here until the American Society pays my passage.
Our Ambassador has spoken of our Fourth of July and the noise it makes. We have got a double Fourth of July--a daylight Fourth and a midnight Fourth. During the day in America, as our Ambassador has indicated, we keep the Fourth of July properly in a reverent spirit. We devote it to teaching our children patriotic things--reverence for the Declaration of Independence. We honor the day all through the daylight hours, and when night comes we dishonor it. Presently--before long--they are getting nearly ready to begin now--on the Atlantic coast, when night shuts down, that pandemonium will begin, and there will be noise, and noise, and noise--all night long--and there will be more than noise there will be people crippled, there will be people killed, there will be people who will lose their eyes, and all through that permission which we give to irresponsible boys to play with firearms and fire-crackers, and all sorts of dangerous things: We turn that Fourth of July, alas! over to rowdies to drink and get drunk and make the night hideous, and we cripple and kill more people than you would imagine.
We probably began to celebrate our Fourth-of-July night in that way one hundred and twenty-five years ago, and on every Fourth-of-July night since these horrors have grown and grown, until now, in our five thousand towns of America, somebody gets killed or crippled on every Fourth-of- July night, besides those cases of sick persons whom we never hear of, who die as the result of the noise or the shock. They cripple and kill more people on the Fourth of July in, America than they kill and cripple in our wars nowadays, and there are no pensions for these folk. And, too, we burn houses. Really we destroy more property on every Fourth-of- July night than the whole of the United States was worth one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning, our day of sorrow. Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.
I have suffered in that way myself. I have had relatives killed in that way. One was in Chicago years ago--an uncle of mine, just as good an uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them--yes, uncles to burn, uncles to spare. This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat. Before that man could ask for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him all, over the forty-five States, and--really, now, this is true--I know about it myself--twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons, recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard.