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HAY'S EULOGY.

The oration delivered in the hall of the house of representatives Thursday in eulogy of the late President McKinley by Secretary of State John Hay was a beautiful and fitting tribute.  It is conceived in most excellent good taste.  From a rhetorical view-point, it seems to leave little to be desired.  It is a finished literary product.  It seems to be one of the finest specimens of modern eloquence.  Although the occasion was one to tempt a man to over statement, the secretary appears to have held himself under admirable restraint and to have pronounced an oration of much more permanent value than most that are delivered on such occasions.

There are probably few if any men in the country better fitted for such a duty than Secretary Hay.  This is true on various grounds.  He is a man of fine literary taste and much experience.  He may be said to be a living witness of the three great tragedies of our national history.  He was the intimate of two of the martyred presidents and by no means a stranger to the other.  He heard and has been a student of the great eulogies of Bancroft and Blaine and other famous orations commemorative of great national events.  And it is, perhaps not to much to say that his will compare with any of them.  But whether it is destined to become a permanent part of our literature, may not now be predicted.  He is a seer indeed who can thus prophesy.  Edward Everett seemed to have had this foresight however when he made the remark he is alleged to have made to President Lincoln at Gettysburg, "I should be more than content, Mr. President, if I could but know that what I shall say in my two hours' speech is destined to live with what you have said in five minutes."  His was a great oration on that occasion, but Lincoln's Gettysburg speech is known by heart by thousands and tens of thousands of school boys and girls who never heard of Everett's oration.

And so Secretary Hay's beautiful and scholarly tribute may not be destined to be immortal, but is is certainly a very fitting pronouncement for the occasion. 

It is expected that there will be a warm debate in the house at Washington, this week, over the proposition to place rural delivery on the contract basis.  The proposal seems to have aroused much controversy and the probabilities are that if rural delivery is to be thus handicapped, it will not be accomplished without a fight.  The free rural delivery system should be kept out of the contract system altogether.  There  will be no good to the service derived from that plan and the only advantage, probably, resulting from it will be the giving of an income to certain contractors who will do nothing but squeeze the men who actually do the taxing labor of delivering the rural mails.  It has been demonstrated that under the contract system men will take contracts for a less sum than they can afford to properly do the wok for.  They then get tired of the job and throw it up or neglect it to the detriment of the public which is entitled to the best service obtainable. Good men should be obtainable for these places and they should be well paid for their work.  It requires them to ride in all kinds of weather.  It matters not whether there be rain or shine the mails must go forward and for such a service the government should pay well.  And the pay should go to the men who actually do the work and not to the contractors who do nothing.  The government would do well to economize in various directions in which its expenditures are extravagant and even wasteful, but the place for economy is not in putting the rural mail carriers on starvation wages.