Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/50

44 none of us know even how to state the new problems of the future. But we know that in these problems O'Reilly with his heart and his head, with his power of reconciliation not merely between different races and different religions, but between rich and poor, between learned and ignorant—we know what an influence he might have exerted, and we can deplore that.

But most of all we know this, that up to this time, and during these last ten years, as the poet Lowell said in his great "Commemoration Ode," that Abraham Lincoln had abolished all the old distinction between Puritan and Cavalier, so Boyle O'Reilly has done more than one man's work to abolish the old distinction between English-American and Irish-American. And let us do our part in his memory to keep it abolished henceforth.


 * I count it a rare privilege, a high honor, to take part in this magnificent demonstration and bear my tribute, though a humble one, to the memory of our distinguished and ever to be lamented friend.

It is true that we cannot just yet find him his just place in letters; we have not sufficient perspective for that. It has taken two hundred and fifty years to assign Shakespeare his proper place.