Public Opinion.




VII

LAFAYETTE BANQUET, FALL RIVER

SEPTEMBER 4, 1916


Seemingly trifling events oft carry in their train great consequences.
The firing of a gun in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Macaulay tells us,
started the Seven Years' War which set the world in conflagration,
causing men to fight each other on every shore of the seven seas and
giving new masters to the most ancient of empires. We see to-day fifteen
nations engaged in the most terrific war in the history of the human
race and trace its origin to the bullet of a madman fired in the
Balkans. It is true that the flintlock gun at Lexington was not the
first, nor yet the last, to fire a "shot heard round the world." It was
not the distance it travelled, but the message it carried which has
marked it out above all other human events. It was the character of
that message which, claimed the attention of him we this day honor, in
the far-off fortress of the now famous Metz; it was because it roused in
the listener a sympathetic response that it was destined to link forever
the events of Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill and Dorchester
Heights, in our Commonwealth, with the name of Lafayette.

For there was a new tone in those Massachusetts guns. It was not the old