GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

Photogravure from a Photograph-by Permission of the New York Photograph and Color Company.

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GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

(1824-1892)

HEN in the Republican national convention held at Chicago in June 1884, George William Curtis climbed on a chair to

protest, on behalf of those who were afterwards called mugwumps," against the Hawkins Resolution, the scene was one of the most dramatic in American history. Mr. Curtis had been one of those whose thorough-going earnestness had forced issues which had retired the Democratic party from power for twenty-five years. Under the Hawkins Resolution, he would have been bound to support the nominee of the convention, with the consent of his conscience or without it. He evidently felt himself in the presence of one of those' great crises when the history of a nation may depend for years on the immediate and determined action of one man. When he climbed on his seat to speak, with his white hair thrown back from his face, and began: "Gentlemen of the convention, a Republican and a free man, I came into this convention; by the grace of God a Republican and a free man will I go out of this convention," his belief in the far-reaching importance of his action was immediately communicated. to the thousands with whom the great hall was packed. The convention which so shortly before had been apparently an uncontrollable chaos of conflicting elements became breathlessly silent, and in making the speech which restored the Democratic party to power by inaugurating the independent Republican movement of 1884, Mr. Curtis had an audience which strained its ears to catch his every word. Perhaps there has not been in all American history a more striking example of the power of such oratory as is natural to any man of great and cultivated intellect, when he is deeply moved by a conscientious conviction of his duty. In his address on Wendell Phillips, delivered in April 1884, Mr. Curtis shows us his own ideal in his elucidation of the character of Phillips. He was not persistently intense in his modes of thought as Phillips was, but at a crisis he could call out wholly unsuspected reserves of, power, as he did in his Chicago speech. He was a scholar rather than a statesman; a gentleman by instinct and habit; gracious in his demeanor, because of being essentially gracious; and seemingly unfitted for the rude. and brawling contentions of practical politics; but such men as he have determined the course of events in America at every crisis,