Bill Nye's Cordwood by Bill Nye (free ebook reader for ipad txt) 📗

I will give the outlines of the speech here, so that in case I should die or slip up on a stenographer the basis of my remarks may not perish:

Fellow-Citizens: You have seen fit to renominate me for the office which I have held one term[Pg 92] already—viz.: member of congress from this district.

As you are aware, I am a self-made man. I have carved out my own career from the ground up, as I may say, till to-day I am your nominee for the second time.

What we want these days is not so much men of marked ability as candidates but available, careful and judicious men. We are too apt to strive for the nomination of brilliant men of pronounced opinions when we must need men who can be easily elected. Of what avail is a man of genius and education and robust brains and earnest convictions if we cannot elect him? He is simply a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

Therefore, I would say to the youth of America—could they stand before me to-day—do not strive too hard or strain yourselves by endeavoring to attain some object after you are elected to office. Let your earnest convictions remain dormant. Should a man have convictions these days, let him reserve them for use in his own family. They are not necessary in politics. If a member of congress must have a conviction and earnestly feels as though he could not possibly get along another day without it, let him go to the grand jury and make a clean breast of it.

I may say, fellow-citizens, without egotism, that[Pg 93] I have been judicious both in the heat of the campaign and in the halls of legislation. I have done nothing that could disrupt the party or weaken our vote in this district. It is better to do nothing than to do things that will be injurious to the interests of the majority.

What do you care, gentlemen, for what I said or did in our great session of last winter so long as I came home to you with a solidified vote for this fall; so long as I have not trodden on the toes of the Irish, the German, the Scandinavian, the prohibitionist, the female-suffragist, the anti-mormon, or the international-copyright crank?

Let us be frank with each other, fellow-citizens. Do you ask me on my return to you how many speeches my private secretary and the public printer attached my name to, or how many packages of fly-blown turnip seed I sent to you during the last two years?

No!!!

You ask yourself how is the vote of our party this fall as compared with two years ago? And I answer that not a vote has been mislaid or a ballot erased.

I have done nothing and said nothing that a carping constituency could get hold of. Though I was never in congress before, old members envied[Pg 94] me the long, blank, evasive, and irreproachable record I have made.

No man can say that, even under the stimulating influence of the wine cup, I have given utterance in the last two years to anything that could be distorted into an opinion. And so to-day I come back to you and find my party harmonious, while others return to their homes to be greeted by a disrupted constituency, over whose ruins the ever-alert adversary clambers to success.

So I say to you to-night, Mr. President and gentlemen of the convention, let us leave to the newspapers the expression of what we call earnest convictions—convictions that arise up in after years to belt us across the face and eyes. Let injudicious young men talk about that kind of groceries, but the wary self-made politician who succeeds does not do that way.

It seems odd to me that young men will go on year after year trying to attain distinction by giving utterance to opinions when they can see for themselves that we do not want such men for any place whatever, from juryman to congressman.

If you examine my record for the last session, for instance, you will not find that I spent the day pounding my desk with an autograph album and filling the air with violent utterances pro or con and then sat up nights to get myself interviewed[Pg 95] by the disturbing elements of the press. No, sir!

I am not a disturber, a radical or a disrupter!

At Washington I am a healer and at home in my ward I am also a heeler!

What America wants to-day is not so much a larger number of high-browed men who will get up on their hind feet and call on heaven to paralyze their right arms before they will do a wrong act, or ask to have their tongues nailed to the ridge-pole of their mouths rather than utter a false or dangerous doctrine. That was customary when the country was new and infested with bears; when men carried their guns to church with them and drank bay rum as a beverage.

These remarks made good pieces for boys to speak, but they will not do now. What this country needs is a congress about as equally balanced as possible politically, so that when one side walks up and smells of an appropriation the other can growl in a low tone of voice, from December till dog-days. In this way by a pleasing system of postponements, previous questions, points of order, reference to committees, laying on the table, and general oblivion, a great deal may be evaded, and people at home who do not closely read and remember the Congressional Record will not know who was to blame.

Judicious inertness and a gentle air of evasion[Pg 96] will do much to prevent party dissension. I have done that way, and I look for the same old majority that we had at the former election.

I often wonder if Daniel Webster would have the nerve to get up and talk as freely about things now as he used to when politics had not reached the present state of perfection. We often hear people ask why we haven't got any Websters in congress now. I can tell you. They are sat down on long before they get that far along. They are not encouraged to say radical things and split up the vote.

I will now close, thanking you for your kind preferment. I will ever strive, while representing you in congress, to retain my following, and never, by word or deed, endeavor to win fame and applause there at the expense of votes at home. I care not to be embalmed in the school speakers and declaimers of future ages, provided my tombstone shall bear upon it the simple, poetic refrain:

He got there.

Perhaps there is nothing in the line of discovery and improvement that has shown more marked progress in the last century than the railway and its different auxiliaries. When we remember that[Pg 97] much less than a century has passed since the first patent for a locomotive to move upon a track was issued, where now we have everything that heart can wish, and, in fact, live better on the road than we do at home, with but thirty-six hours between New York and Minneapolis, and a gorgeous parlor, bedroom, and dining-room between Maine and Oregon, with nothing missing that may go to make life a rich blessing, we are compelled to express our wonder and admiration.

To Peter Cooper is largely due the boom given to railway business, he having constructed the first locomotive ever made in this country, and put it on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.

The first train ever operated must have been a grand sight. First came the locomotive, a large Babcock fire-extinguisher on trucks, with a smoke-stack like a full-blown speaking-tube with a frill around the top; the engineer at his post in a plug hat, with an umbrella over his head and his hand on the throttle, borrowing a chew of tobacco now and then of the farmers who passed him on their way to town. Near him stood the fireman, now and then bringing in an armful of wood from the fields through which he passed, and turning the damper in the smoke-stack every little while so it would draw. Now and then he would go forward and put a pork-rind on a hot box or pound on[Pg 98] the cylinder head to warn people off the track.

Next comes the tender loaded with nice, white birch wood, an economical style of fuel because its bark may be easily burned off while the wood itself will remain uninjured. Besides the firewood we find on the tender a barrel of rainwater and a tall, blonde jar with wicker-work around it, which contains a small sprig of tansy immersed in four gallons of New England rum. This the engineer has brought with him for use in case of accident. He is now engaged in preparing for the accident in advance.

Next comes the front brakeman in a plug hat about two sizes too large for him. He also wears a long-waisted frock coat with a bustle to it and a tall shirt-collar with a table-spread tie, the ends of which flutter gayly in the morning breeze. As the train pauses at the first station he takes a hammer out of the tool-box and nails on the tire of the fore wheel of his coach. The engineer gets down with a long oil-can and puts a little sewing-machine oil on the pitman. He then wipes it off with his sleeve.

It is now discovered that the rear coach, containing a number of directors and the division superintendent, is missing. The conductor goes to the rear of the last coach, and finds that the string by which the directors' car was attached is[Pg 99] broken, and that, the grade being pretty steep, the directors and one brakeman have no doubt gone back to the starting place.

But the conductor is cool. He removes his bell-crowned plug hat, and, taking out his orders and time-card, he finds that the track is clear, and, looking at a large, valuable Waterbury watch, presented to him by a widow whose husband was run over and killed by the train, he sees he can still make the next station in time for dinner. He hires a livery team to go back after the directors' coach, and, calling "All aboard," he swings lightly upon the moving train.

It is now 10 o'clock, and nineteen weary miles still stretch out between him and the dinner station. To add to the horrors of the situation, the front brakeman discovers that a very thirsty boy in the emigrant car has been drinking from the water-supply tank on the tender, and there is not enough left to carry the train through. Much time is consumed in filling the barrel again at a spring near the track, but the conductor finds a "spotter" on the train, and gets him to do it. He also induces him to cut some more wood and clean out the ashes.

The engineer then pulls out a draw-head and begins to make up time. In twenty minutes he has made up an hour's time, though two miles of hoop-iron are torn from the track behind him. He[Pg 100] sails into the eating station on time, and, while the master mechanic takes several of the coach-wheels over to the machine-shop to soak, he eats a hurried lunch.

The brakeman here gets his tin lanterns ready for the night run and fills two of them with red oil to be used on the rear coach. The fireman puts a fresh bacon-rind on the eccentric, stuffs some more cotton batting around the axles, puts a new lynch-pin in the hind wheels, sweeps the apple-peelings out of the smoking car, and he is ready.

Then comes the conductor, with his plug hat full of excursion tickets, orders, passes, and timechecks; he looks at his Waterbury watch, waves his hand, and calls "All aboard" again. It is upgrade, however, and for two miles the "spotter" has to push behind with all his might before the conductor will allow him to get on and ride.

Thus began the history of a gigantic enterprise which has grown till it is a comfort, a convenience, a luxury, and yet a necessity. It has built up and beautified the desert. It has crept beneath the broad river, scaled the snowy mountain, and hung by iron arms from the canon and the precipice, carrying the young to new lands and reuniting those long separated. It has taken the hopeless to lands of new hope. It has evaded the solitude of the