Ladies and Gentlemen:—I feel very greatly honored in being chosen to preside at this meeting. This employment is new to me. I never have taken any part in a political canvass before, except to vote. The tribe of which I am the humblest member—the literary tribe—is one which is not given to bothering about politics; but there are times when the strangest departures are justifiable—and such a season, I take it, is the present canvass. Some one asked me the other day, why it was that nearly all the people who write books and magazines had lately come to the front and proclaimed their political preference, since such a thing had probably never occurred before in America; and why it was that almost all of this strange, new band of volunteers marched under the banner of Hayes and Wheeler. I think these people have come to the front mainly because they think they see at last a chance to make this government a good government; because they think they see a chance to institute an honest and sensible system of civil service, which shall so amply prove its worth and worthiness that no succeeding president can ever venture to put his foot upon it. Our present civil system, born of General Jackson and the democratic party, is so idiotic, so contemptible, so grotesque, that it would make the very savages of Dahomey jeer and the very god of solemnity laugh.

We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge; we will not hire a school teacher who does not know the alphabet; we will not have a man about us in our business life—in any walk of it, low or high—unless he has served an apprenticeship, and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do; we even require a plumber to know something (Laughter, and a pause by the speaker) about his business (More laughter); that he shall at least know which side of a ‸gas‸ pipe is the inside (Shouts); but when you come to our civil service we serenely fill great numbers of our minor public offices with ignoramuses; we put the vast business of a custom house in the hands of a flathead who does not know a bill of lading from a transit of Venus (laughter and a pause)—never having heard of either of them before (laughter); under a treasury appointment we pour out oceans of money, and accompanying statistics, through the hands and brain of an ignorant villager who never before could wrestle with a two-weeks’ wash-bill without getting thrown. [Laughter.] Under our consular system we send creatures all over the world who speak no language but their own, and even when it comes to that go wading all their days through the blood of murdered tenses, and flourishing the scalps of mutilated parts of speech. When forced to it we order home a foreign ambassador who is frescoed all over with—with—indiscreetness‸es‸, but we immediately send one in his place whose moral ceiling has a perceptible shady tint to it. And then he brays when we supposed he was going to roar.

We carefully train and educate our naval officers and military men, and we ripen and perfect their capacities through long service and experience, and keep hold of these excellent servants through a just system of promotion. This is exactly what we hope to do with our civil service under Mr. Hayes. (Applause.) We hope and expect to sever that service as utterly from politics as is the naval and military service. And we hope to make it as respectable, too. We hope to make worth and capacity the sole requirements in the civil service, in place of the amount of party dirty work the candidate has done.

By the time General Hawley has finished his speech I think you will know why we, in this matter, put our trust in Hayes, in preference to any other man.

I am not going to say anything about our candidates for state offices, because you know them, honor them, and will vote for them. But General Hawley (applause) being comparatively a stranger, I will say a single word in commendation of him, and it will furnish one of the many reasons why I am going to vote for him for Congress. I ask you to look seriously and thoughtfully at just one almost incredible fact. General Hawley in his official capacity as President of the Centennial commission, has done one thing which you may not have heard commented on, and yet it is one of the most astounding performances of this decade—an act almost impossible, perhaps, to any other public officer in this nation. General Hawley has taken as high as a hundred and twenty-one thousand dollars gate-money at the Centennial in a single day—(Pause and applause)—and never stole a cent of it! (Laughter and loud cheers.) (“Just Before the Battle,” Hartford Evening Post, 2 Oct 76, 2, clipping in Scrapbook 8:25–26, CU-MARK)