REMARKS OF COL. THOMAS W. HIGGINSON.
Mr. Chairman: You struck the keynote of the evening in describing the mission of our friend Boyle O'Reilly, as first and chiefly a mission of love and reconciliation. That, after all, was the strong point of this strong man's career.
Standing here as I do, one of various speakers, representing widely different positions in religion and politics and nationality, it seems to me that I have never been at a similar gathering where the speakers were so welded into sympathy by the quality of one man's mind. It is the thing which has given him his influence and usefulness here, and made him a reconciler between different races and different religions. It is a rare gift among us.
In the case of Boyle O'Reilly, attractiveness was a weak word for that charming personality which made itself felt by all who came near him, and which caused his fellow-members of the Papyrus Club—a collection of gentlemen who, being mostly journalists and literary men, are as little liable to compliment one another as any set I know—to declare in their funeral resolutions that he, their first president, was the best beloved of all their members.
That was the quality which made him peculiarly fitted to do his share in a work so momentous for Boston, so momentous for America, so momentous
