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JAMES A. GARFIELD.

MEMORIAL ADDRESS

PRONOUNCED IN THE

HALL OF REPRESENTATIVES,

FEBRUARY 27, 1882,

BEFORE THE Departments of the GOVERNMENT OF
THE UNITED STATES,

BY

JAMES G. BLAINE,

IN RESPONSE TO AN INVITATION FROM THE
TWO HOUSES OF CONGRESS.

WASHINGTON:

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE.

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MEMORIAL ADDRESS.

Mr. PRESIDENT: For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first-born. GARFIELD was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. "Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited

where such example was last to have been looked for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smoothfaced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character."

From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising against Charles I., about twenty thousand emigrants came from old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his most effective

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