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It was a cloudy, nasty day: and the aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the course of thousands of years or, perhaps, centuries. The Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean.
I thank Voltaire, that great man who for half a century was the intellectual monarch of Europe, and who, from his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom. I thank the inventors, I thank the discoverers, the thinkers and the scientists, and I thank the honest millions who have toiled. I thank the brave men with brave thoughts.
Those were something stranger, more wonderful, and more splendid, even than Abou-Simbel and Karnak, Many an evening, while the firelight from a Southern pine knot danced on my page, I was gone on the wings of fancy thousands of miles away; and went with discoverers or explorers, up and down the passages and halls and staircases and chambers, to which the entrance is from Biban el Malook.
A few strange birds have flown from it and lighted on the heads of the Discoverers, a few spars of wisdom has been washed ashore, and some strange leaves and sea-weeds, all tellin' us that they have come from a new world different from ours, and one more riz up like more like the Immortal.
A horde of clerkly spies were employed under the name of "Discoverers," to ransack old Irish tenures in the archives of Dublin and London, with such good success, that in a very short time 66,000 acres in Wicklow, and 385,000 acres in Leitrim, Longford, the Meaths, and King's and Queen's Counties, were "found by inquisition to be vested in the Crown."
The people at home, improving upon the reports of the sailors, said that "the land which the Prince sought after was merely some sandy place like the deserts of Libya; that princes had possessed the empires of the world, and yet had not undertaken such designs as his, nor shown such anxiety to find new kingdoms; that the men who arrived in those foreign parts if they did arrive turned from white into black men; that the King Don John, the Prince's father, had endowed foreigners with land in his kingdom, to break it up and cultivate it a thing very different from taking the people out of Portugal, which had need of them, to bring them among savages to be eaten, and to place them upon lands of which the mother country had no need; that the Author of the world had provided these islands solely for the habitation of wild beasts, of which an additional proof was that those rabbits the discoverers themselves had introduced were now dispossessing them of the island."
They are the heroes who have slain the monsters of ignorance and fear, who have outgazed the Gorgon and driven the cruel gods from their thrones. They are the inventors, the discoverers, the great mechanics, the kings of the useful who have civilized this world. At the head of this heroic army, foremost of all, stands Voltaire, whose memory we are honoring tonight.
He will do so because he must. It is not in his nature to violate his nature for the sake of acquiring knowledge, however great the incentives or threatenings attending the process. 'The child's mind ... with reference to all unacquired knowledge ... stands in precisely the attitude of the experimenters and discoverers of riper years.
Our discoverers did not go to make themselves rich, when they sailed out one after another into the dreary frozen seas; nor did the ladies, who went out last year, to drudge in the hospitals of the East, making themselves poor, that they might be rich in noble works.
If in reality the brothers had not gone beyond the Black Hills in South Dakota, then their most important work appears to have been done within what is now Canada, as discoverers of the Saskatchewan, the mighty river which carries to far-distant Hudson Bay the waters melted on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
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