EXERCISES IN HONOR OF DANA

About 500 people attended the meeting to observe the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Richard Henry Dana '37 given under the auspices of the Cambridge Historical Society in Sanders Theatre last evening. Members of the Harvard Memorial Society were honorary ushers. The Right Reverend William Lawrence '71, Bishop of Massachusetts presided. The addresses were full of interesting anecdotes of Dana as a man of letters, a lawyer, a writer on international law, an anti-slavery leader, and as a citizen, and Bishop Lawrence, in introducing the other speakers, spoke briefly of Dana as a churchman.

The three speakers of the evening were the Honorable Joseph Hodges Choate '52, late ambassador of the United States to the Court of St. James, Professor Bliss Perry, and the Honorable Moorfield Storey '66.

Mr. Choate spoke of "Dana as a Citizen, Lawyer, and Writer on International Law." Mr. Dana's first venture in politics, in his thirty-second year, he said, marked clearly his independence of spirit, his love of the right, and determination to maintain it at whatever cost, and his clear foresight into the political future. He hated the Abolitionists, who were altogether too unconventional for him, but he made his debut in political life as chairman of the Free Soil Meetings at the Tremont Temple. He declared: 'I am a Free Soiler because I am (who should not say so) of the stock of the old northern gentry, and have a particular dislike to any subserviency, or even appearance of subserviency, on the part of our people to the slave-holding oligarchy.' After the close of the war Mr. Dana resigned his office of United States District Attorney, and was not engaged in any more serious forensic conflicts, but he devoted two continuous years to his edition of Wheaton's 'Elements of International Law.'

A Signally Noble Career.

"I confess my inability, in the space of time allowed, to do justice to Mr. Dana's lofty character and to his signally noble career, which was guided from first to last by high principle, an indomitable courage, a lofty independence of spirit, and a mind always conscious to itself of right. He met with many cruel disappointments, his aspiring dreams were not realized, but take him, all for all, he was a man of whom his native state and country may well be proud, and give him a high place among its immortals."

Professor Perry spoke of "Richard Henry Dana as a Man of Letters." "The popular impression of Richard Henry Dana is that he was a man of one book, 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Such impressions are not always infallible, and yet the offhand, instinctive judgment upon which they rest is usually right enough for all practical purposes. In Dana's case the popular verdict is not likely to be reversed. It is one of the ironies of literature that this son of a poet, inheriting so much that was finest in the old New England culture, a pupil of Emerson, trained at Harvard, toiling gallantly in a great profession, a public-spirited citizen of a commonwealth which he served nobly and without much tangible reward, should be chiefly remembered by his record of an enforced holiday in his boyhood--by what he himself called a 'parenthesis' in his life.

Writings Still Live.

"Such writing lingers in the memory, though it be only the memory of a few. But for one American who has read Dana's 'Speeches in Stirring Times' there are thousands throughout the English-speaking world who have shared with the boyish Dana his pleasure in the 'perfect silence of the sea' and 'the early breaking of day on the wide ocean,' his awe at 'the cold and angry skies' and 'long heavy ugly seas' off the Cape, who have seen with him the 'malignant' brightness of the lightning in the tropical storm, the yellow California sunshine and the gray California fog, and the slow stately motion of the groaning Antartic icebergs with the whirling snow about their summits'."

Mr. Storey considered Dana as an anti-slavery leader. "Stated briefly" he said, "Dana's position was that slavery was so great an evil that it could not be tolerated in territories where it did not exist, but that under the constitution we could not interfere with it in the states where it was already established. This was the platform on which the Republican party was founded and upon which it made the contests in 1856 which resulted in the defeat of Fremont, and, in 1860, when its victory made Abraham Lincoln president. In 1848, however, there were few who were ready to accept this doctrine. Mr. Dana was one of the few who left the Whig party and attended the Free Soil convention at Buffalo which nominated Van Buren and Adams.

His Unselfish Service to Others.

"It is true that he won neither great wealth nor high office, and that in his own commonwealth he saw many win both who were in no way superior to him in ability or character, like his arch-enemy Benjamin F. Butler, but 'the wise years decide.' Weighed in the true scales could any fortune, however large, or any office, however high, could anything that he won for himself outbalance the unselfish service which he rendered to others? Is self-sacrifice failure? Shall we measure success by what a man gets, or by what he gives? Shall we forget the immortal words 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.'