238 BANQUET. 
with him are Mr. J. Howland Gardner, Mr. W. J. Parslow, Mr. W. W. Smith, Mr. 
H. R. Sutphen, Mr. F. L. DuBosque, Mr. F. G. Coburn, Mr. H. H. Raymond, and Mr. 
H. N. Fletcher. They are responsible for the arrangements made for your entertain- 
ment this evening, and I am sure you will wish me to thank them in your behalf. 
Our next speaker is from the good old shipbuilding city of Brooklyn. He was 
a stranger to me until this evening, but now we are very friendly. His folks went 
from Ireland to Scotland and then came over here, and my folks in the meantime were 
engaged in dodging the authorities in Scotland to go to Ireland and then came over 
here. So we are both Scotch-Irish, and we have a common bond of sympathy in that 
we have been mixed up in one way or another in every row that has happened for a 
long time where machinery and modern implements of war were used. 
The gentleman who will address us comes of a shipbuilding family, but he tells 
me he gave up shipbuilding to go to Congress and recently was caught in the enormous 
political landslide that happened. He has been elected a Justice of the Supreme Court 
-of the State of New York. 
Down our way we were surprised about the election. A friend of mine, a former 
Democrat, living in New York, and who is here tonight, said he didn’t know what had 
happened, but apparently there was a lot of discontent in the United States; a discon- 
tent that is probably quite natural under the circumstances and which may be 
repeated in some other direction later on—you cannot tell. 
Whoever is to straighten out the mess that we are in certainly has a fair-sized 
job and is to be sympathized with from the start to the finish. I think the difference 
between some of us who call ourselves Democrats in the South, and some others in 
another section of the country is not perhaps as great as might be assumed. Those 
of us who are engaged in industry, and who in recent years have watched the tremen- 
dous concentration of power in certain places, or where men at the head of great unions 
deal with men at the head of great aggregations of capital or heads of governmental 
departments—I am sure that the thinking men in industry feel that centralization has 
rather gone the limit so far as we are concerned, and that perhaps it was just as well 
we looked over ancient democratic notions, which are that a man shall govern his own 
household and attend to his own business, and settle his rows with his own neighbors, run 
his own local government, and have just as much a centralized form of authority as 
is necessary and no more. (Applause.) It may be true that, after all, the ancient 
Democrats were not as far wrong as we may think in insisting that a reasonable degree 
of state and local rights is necessary to the welfare of a great republic. 
I am not going to make a political speech, but I just want to say that, although 
we have no kick whatever on the election (laughter)—any more than you had four 
years ago—that any industrial concentration of power, so that the contact between 
employer and employee is removed from the particular establishment and carried off 
to the seat of government, is an un-American conception. (Applause.) We must 
show that, no matter how much friends from abroad shall insist that the closed shop 
is the only method of operating a business, there are a lot of us in the United States who 
do not think so. 
Gentlemen, the next speaker has not been assigned a subject. 
It is a great pleasure to have Judge MacCrate here with us this evening. He 
will respond to the toast, ‘‘The Past, the Present and the Future.”’ It gives me great 
pleasure to present him to you—The Honorable John MacCrate! 
