Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1885-10-02

We COPY elsewhere the London IfmCS'S
report of the speech made by United
States Minister Phelps to club of work
ing men, which has attracted such wide
and favorable attention in England. 1t
seems to us felicitous and excellent talk,
for such an occasion containing useful
and timely suggestions for Americans as
well as Englishmen and it is quite no.
ticeable to what an extent it has met the
approval of men and organs of all par
ties in England. The London Times gave
an editorial column to it, saying in addi-
ton to some things we have already
quoted:
Mr. Phelps has spoken at the Mansion
house, of course, and spoken well and
yesterday he opened a WorkmenS Club
near Rugby, and told his laborng au-
dience much that it must have done them
good to hear about his country and their
own. There is no need to make minute
comparisons A man may make an ex-
cellent speech without quite attaining to
the perfection of form of which Mr.. Low
ell had the mastery and Mr.. Phelps says
what is worth hearing, even if his cpl
grams are fewer and u little less highly
finished than his predecessors.
The Morning Post, high Tory, also gave
an extended editorial to the speech, which
our readers have seen. The Sheffield IN.
dependent, a radical organ, said of that
and the later speech to the Sheffield Cut
lers:
The speech at the Cutters feast, last
night, of the Honorable E. j. Phelps, the
new American Minister to Great Britain,
was timely, cautious and skillful, and in
excellent taste Mr.. Phelps, with much
practical wisdom, managed to steer in the
happy and safe middle course between
laudation and disparagement of this coun-
Try or of his own. He recognized the vr
tues of both peoples, and if he did per
ceive their faults, he succeeded for the
time in being judiciously blind. He con-
tended that the two great English speak
ing peoples on both sides of the Atlantic
should be more closely united in sympa-
thy, and aim, and effort, and he believed
that unseen forces were drawing them
closer together daily. But the last nights
speech, as befitted the occasion and the
place, was more restricted in subject and
more restrained in tone than his speech
on the previous night at Clifton, near
Rugby, when opening newly-erected
Working Mems Club The two speeches,
however. showed Mr.. Phelps to be no I'M
worthy successor of, perhaps, the ablest
Minister whom the United States have
ever sent to these shores-Mr James Rus
sell Lowell.
These words Of praise, it is to be noted
are not from any mouthpiece of English
aristocracy but from an able and pro-
gressive journal, whose sympathies are
strongly on the side Of the common peo-
pie, and which, elsewhere in the same ar
ticle, attributes the heathful and vigor-
Gus political life of England, (Which it de-
clares to be stronger and more healthful
to-day than ever BEFORE to the infusion
of American methods of political action
into English life, and to the approXima-
ton of the institutions of Great Britain
to those of the United States.
1t should be gratifying to men of all
parties that our countryman is so worth
lily justifying the expectations of his
friends, in his action and utterances
abroad and we should suppose that
even the New York WOrld with its Thur
man craze, might see that Mr.. Thurman
could not do this sort Of thing any better
than Mr.. Phelps is doing it.