Savannah Morning News

THE "WESTERN SOCIETY."
Social and Theological Celebrities in the Great Metropolis.

NEW YORK, Nov. 8.—I see that an organization to be known as the Western Society is to be formed in New York. Only persons born in the West are eligible to membership. This recalls the fact that there are quite a number of societies in New York worthy of at least a passing notice. For example, are the descendants of Revolutionary officers, and the society was formed at the time of the evacuation of the city by the British. The Huguenot Society is composed of descendants of French Protestants who fled to this country in 1682 and later. The descendants in the male line of Dutch emigrants in the Holland Society is relatively as great as the number of army or Colonels at the South. They are Generals in the Spanish game of ninepins in Bowling Green, but Washington Irving, who once loved a sleek New Yorker, many of them wealthy and some of whom never heard of the gentle Irving, so ignorant are they of American literature, are many business men in this city. Then is the old New York Society. The New England Society, however, of all these organizations, has attracted the most attention. Ever since 1805 this society has taken care of persons from New England who have drifted to this city and found themselves in indigent circumstances. It has annual dinners which do much to maintain a respect for New England. The Roundheads of England left their mark on the old country, but their brethren in feeling, if not in ties of blood, the Puritans of New England, have left, perhaps, an even greater impress on the life, the customs, manners and aspirations of a part of the republic which has come to be known as New England. The descendants of witch-burning Cotton Mather and other reverend and non-reverend murderers who were not hanged, as the Chicago anarchists will be, simply because they merely laid red hands on cranks in a war against witchcraft, are not so stern as their forefathers, and they sit in full dress suits with patent leather pumps at the brilliant tables of Delmonico once a year at least to listen to oratory which is the best of its kind, but which Hawthorne's grim Puritans in sad colored garments would have regarded as mere profane vaporings compared to the ancient discourses, running up to seventy times seven in their remorseless applications, which sounded through bare, dreary meeting houses in a bigot nasal key, both on Sabbath day and lecture day. Of the New England Society William M. Evarts is perhaps the most brilliant orator. He is said to esteem his membership in this organization as an honor transcending any other he has ever enjoyed. If Mr. Evarts ever said this he can afford to browse on his laurels as a prince of flattery out blarneying the Blarney stone itself in Celtic effusiveness of complimentary expression. He is a very valiant trencherman. He is one of the greatest diners-out in New York, and the gossips add that he begins at the beginning and ends at the end as respects both solids and liquids, and that he is, nevertheless, neither dyspeptic nor intemperate. He still weighs only about 110 pounds, but is a match for the average "gourmet" of New York, London or Paris.

In former years Edward Everett, Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, a proud New England triumvirate of intellectual power, attended the annual reunions, and on one occasion Mr. Webster made one of the greatest oratorical efforts of his life. Henry Ward Beecher was formerly one of the most notable of the society's orators, and the Rev. R. S. Storrs was another speaker of exceptional merits, rather as a rhetorician than as a thinker, for intellectually he is a pigmy compared to the large-brained, dome-headed champion of liberality in religious thought, Beecher, at whose heels so many spiteful spaniels have snapped in recent years. Dr. Storrs possesses, perhaps, a more varied culture than Mr. Beecher, and there are those in Brooklyn who would liken him to Boston's former idol, the polished and scholarly Edward Everett. His style of eloquence is smooth as ice and quite as cold; his sentences have a glacial polish: they please the ear with an uninterrupted flow of harmonious speech, but do not strike as with the prophet's commanding rod the springs of popular feeling. Neither Mr. Beecher nor Dr. Storrs now attend the New England dinners given in the metropolis. Since the celebrated trial the two divines have had no intercourse. Mr. Beecher, I understand, is no longer invited to attend the New England Society's dinners and Dr. Storrs is not seen there. Mr. Beecher and his friends some years ago organized another New England society in Brooklyn, and only those who are acceptable to both societies are invited.

Mr. Beecher, who has just returned from England, had, by the way, a very successful trip, financially and otherwise. He has a salary of $20,000 a year from Plymouth church and refused a substantial increase which was at one time suggested; he earns some $15,000 a year by his lectures and has a moderate income as an author. Formerly he received a salary of $5,000 a year as an editor. No clergyman in the United States has ever received so large a pecuniary return from his labors as Mr. Beecher. In a single year he has earned over $50,000, yet he has only a very moderate fortune. He is careless with money; he is too great a man to bow before the dollar. He is generous, charitable and a poor business man. Several years ago he sold his house in Brooklyn, but he still owns a fine place at Peekskill, N. Y. His trial cost a fortune, and however the fact may be deplored, the sun of his remarkable career, as now in his old age it slowly sinks in the west, is going down under a cloud. His former friend, Dr. Storrs, has an income of about $15,000 a year as a clergyman and lecturer, lives in the Heights, one of the finest urban localities in this country, and is said to be worth $250,000. He is a well-meaning man and is President of the Long Island Historical Society, to which, in his life of busy idleness, he devotes considerable attention. He is, I believe, one of the wealthiest clergymen in Brooklyn. In New York the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, the son of the late Gen. Dix, is understood to have a fortune of $500,000. One of the clerical pets of the late half the sale of whose art effects furor is said to have received and kept, as with a death clutch, some $600,000 in government bonds, which the lady, in a moment of aberration, appeared to have given him.

OSCAR WILLOUGHBY RIGGS.