358 Extracts from Addresses
educational people and business people, not only between employers and
employed, but for the future between the two great nations that we
represent at this gathering. I should like to remind you of what hap-
pened in the year 1863. The city from which I come, Manchester, is
one of the great business centres of Great Britain; in fact, it is the
centre of an industrial population, which is more densely packed than, I
believe, the industrial population in any other part of the world. In the
year 1863 a great mass meeting was held in Free Trade Hall at Man-
chester. At that time Lancashire was suffering immensely in its cotton
trade from what was happening during those years, but at that meeting
a resolution was sent to President Lincoln proclaiming that in the view
of that meeting the English and Americans were at heart one people,
and Lincoln acknowledged that message and answered it by saying that
he regarded that meeting and that message as an augury that, “what-
ever else might happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or
my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two
nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.” And
in the same year, again speaking in Manchester, John Bright on our side
said: “I am persuaded that the more perfectly friendship is established
between the people of England and the free people of America, the more
will social and political liberty advance among us.”
I cannot better close than with those two messages from the two
sides of the Atlantic, and express the hope that as time goes on the
efforts that may be made by this Mission, and I hope by thousands of
other persons working for cooperation on both sides of the water, will
end in the lasting, enduring, and never to be shaken friendship between
these two great nations.
V
FOLLOWING THE CONFERENCE ON RECONSTRUCTION
AFTER THE WAR, WEDNESDAY MORNING,
NOVEMBER 27
DR. WALKER (after Dr. Willett’s address on A Federation of
Churches) : It has been suggested that it might be of interest
to you if I told you something about the movement in favor of church
reunion in England. It is a remarkable movement, remarkable in itself,
and still more remarkable for the very rapid progress that the move-