DEPEW, CHAUNCEY MITCHELL, LL.D., statesman, orator, and railway president; born at Peekskill, N. Y., April 23, 1834. He graduated at Yale in 1856, studied law, and was admitted to the bar. He was a member of the New York Assembly in 1861-62, and its speaker during part of his term ; was elected Secretary of State of New York in 1863, serving from 1864-66; and was for a short time United States Minister to Japan. His service as legal counsel for railways began in connection with the New York & Harlem Railroad Company in 1866; and at the consolidation of that company with the New York Central Railroad Company in 1869, he became the general counsel of the united companies; was made second vicepresident in 1882, and president in 1885. In 1897 he was president of the West Shore Railroad, and a director in thirty-four companies, and held voting proxies representing $70,000,000. He received three-fourths of the Republican vote in the New York legislature for United States Senator in 1877, but withdrew in favor of Warner Miller; declined the nomination for United States Senator in 1892; and declined appointment as United States Secretary of State to succeed James G. Blaine. In the Republican National Convention in 1888, he received one hundred votes as candidate for nomination to the presidency. In the convention of 1892

he was the leader of those who favored President Harrison's renomination. He served as president of the Union League Club of New York, and of the Yale Alumni Association. His unfailing geniality and sincerity of spirit, with his flashing wit and his brilliant and forcible diction, placed him in the front rank of popular post-prandial speakers of the United States. A collection of his more notable orations was published, in 1890.

THE POLITICAL MISSION OF THE UNITED STATES.

Mr. President and Gentlemen:

The subject assigned to me falls more naturally into the domain of the philosophical theorist, or of the practical politician, than of the active man of affairs. We are all men of business, and absorbed in its details, and neither our time nor our associations admit of prolonged speculations upon the possibilities of government. We are an industrial people, and the great question with us is, How do institutions best serve our needs? We are not so wholly materialistic that we cannot deeply feel the sentiments of liberty and nationality, and yet both form the broad foundation upon which we must build for permanence. No intelligent consideration of the question affecting our present and future is possible without an understanding of the successive stages in the development of our system.

The political mission of the United States has so far been brought out by individuals and territorial conditions. Four men of unequalled genius have dominated. our century, and the growth of the West has revolutionized the Republic. The principles which have heretofore controlled the policy of the country have mainly owed their force and acceptance to Hamilton, Jefferson, Webster, and Lincoln.

The two great creative contests of America were purely defensive. They were neither the struggles of dynastic ambitions nor of democratic revenges. They were calm and determined efforts for good government,

and closed without rancor or the husbanding of resources for retaliation. The Revolution was a war for the preservation of well-defined constitutional liberties, but dependent upon them were the industrial freedom necessary for the development of the country, the promotion of manufactures, and independence of foreign producers.

The first question which met the young confederacy, torn by the jealousies of its stronger and weaker colonies, was the necessity of a central power strong enough to deal with foreign nations and to protect commerce between the States. At this period Alexander Hamilton became the saviour of the Republic. If Shakespeare is the commanding originating genius of England, and Goethe of Germany, Hamilton must occupy that place among Americans. At seventeen he had formulated the principles of government by the people so clearly, that no succeeding publicist has improved them. Before he was twenty-five he had made suggestions to the hopeless financiers of the Revolution which revived. credit and carried through the war. With few precedents to guide him, he created a fiscal system for the United States which was so elastic and comprehensive that it still controls the vast operations of the treasury and the customs. Though but a few years at the bar after his retirement from public life, his briefs are embodied in Constitution and statutes, and to his masterly address the press owes its freedom.

This superb intelligence, which was at once philosophic and practical, and with unrivalled lucidity could instruct the dullest mind on the bearing of the action of the present on the destiny of the future, so impressed upon his contemporaries the necessity of a central government with large powers, that the Constitution, now one hundred and one years old, was adopted, and the United States began their life as a nation.

At this period, in every part of the world, the doctrine that the Government is the source of power, and that the people have only such rights as the Government had given, was practically unquestioned, and the young Republic began its existence with the new and dynamic principle that the people are the sole source of authority,