The airy amplitude of the
building, the perfect order and the perfect freedom of movement, the ease
of access and exit, the completeness of the arrangements that in the
afternoon gave all of us thirty thousand spectators a chance to behold the
great spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as
personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served
greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed
with humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass.
It was rumored in the morning that the ceremonies were to begin with
prayer by a hundred ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the
exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till the last speech was
being made by a gentleman whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom I
suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of twenty thousand people in
his vicinity, but who was to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand,
a voice merely. One word only I caught, and I report it here that posterity
may know as much as we thirty thousand contemporaries did of
THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH.
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