to England, he has learned a more excellent way.  Like Greeley he would no doubt at the last fight, if need be, for the territorial integrity of his country.  But he has learned the lesson Charles James Fox taught nearly a hundred years before:  “The more Ireland is under Irish Government, the more she will be bound to English interests.”  That precept he has been trying to reduce to practice.  God grant the old statesman life and light to see the sure end of the work he has begun! [Loud applause.]

I must not sit down without a word more to express the personal gratification I feel in seeing an old comrade here as your guest.  Twelve or fourteen years ago he did me the honor to fill for a time an important place on the staff of my newspaper.  With what skill and power he did his work; with what readiness and ample store of information you need not be told, for the anonymous editorial writer of those days is now known to the English-speaking world as the brilliant historian of “Our Own Times.”  Those of us who knew him then have seen his sacrifice of private interests and personal tastes for the stormy life of an Irish member of Parliament, and have followed with equal interest and admiration his bold yet prudent and high-minded Parliamentary career.  He has done all that an Irishman ought for his country; he has done it with as little sympathy or encouragement for the policy of dynamite and assassination in England as we have had for bomb-throwing in Chicago. [Loud and prolonged applause.]

W. L. ROBBINS

THE PULPIT AND THE BAR

[Speech of Rev. W. L. Robbins at the annual dinner of the New York State Bar Association, given in the City of Albany, N. Y., January 20, 1891, in response to the sentiment, “The Relation of the Pulpit to the Bar.”  Matthew Hale presided.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—­I am so dazed at the temerity which has ventured to put so soporific a subject as “The Pulpit” at so late an hour in the evening, that I can only conceive of but one merit in any response to the present toast, and that is brevity.  I had always supposed that the pulpit was “sleepy” enough in its effect upon men in the early hours of the day, at least that was my conclusion, in so far as it has been my privilege to see men present, at pulpit ministrations, leaving us as they do for the most part to preach to women and children.  Shall I confess that the feeling came over me during the first part of the evening that I was rather out of place among so many laymen, alone as a representative of the clergy; but later, I found confidence through a sense of kinship in suffering, for is it not true that we represent two of the best abused professions in the world?  I do not mean by that, abuse ab extra.  I am told indeed, occasionally, that the pulpit is effete, that its place has been filled by the press and lecture platform, that there is no further use for it.  But I do not know that I have heard abuse ab extra of the Bar, unless some ill-natured person should read it into the broad Scotch pronunciation of an old friend of mine who used to say to me, “Ah, the lieyers, the lieyers.”