[Speech of Rev. Dr. Heman L. Wayland at the eighty-fourth annual
dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December
23, 1889. The President, Cornelius N. Bliss, proposed the query for
Dr. Wayland, "Why are New Englanders Unpopular?" enforcing it with
the following quotations: "Do you question me as an honest man
should do for my simple true judgment?" [Much Ado About Nothing,
Act I, Sc. I], and "Merit less solid less despite has bred: the man
that makes a character makes foes" [Edward Young]. Turning to Dr.
Wayland, Mr. Bliss said: "Our sister, the New England Society of
Philadelphia, to-night sends us greeting in the person of her
honored President, whom I have the pleasure of presenting to you."
The eloquence of Dr. Wayland was loudly applauded; and Chauncey M.
Depew declared that he had heard one of the best speeches to which
he had ever listened at a New England dinner.]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--That I am here this evening is as
complete a mystery to me as to you. I do not know why your Society, at
whose annual meetings orators are as the sand upon the seashore for
multitude, should call upon Philadelphia, a city in which the acme of
eloquence is attained by a Friends' Yearly Meeting, "sitting under the
canopy of silence." I can only suppose that you designed to relieve the
insufferable brilliancy of your annual festival, that you wished to
dilute the highly-flavored, richly-colored, full-bodied streams of the
Croton with the pure, limpid, colorless (or, at any rate, only
drab-colored) waters of the Schuylkill. [Laughter.]
My first and wiser impulse was to decline the invitation with which you
honored me, or rather the Society of which I am the humblest member.
But I considered the great debt we have been under to you for the loan
of many of your most accomplished speakers: of Curtis, whose diction is
chaste as the snows of his own New England, while his zeal for justice
is as fervid as her July sun; of Depew, who, as I listen to him, makes
me believe that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and that in a
former day his soul occupied the body of one of the Puritan fathers, and
that for some lapse he was compelled to spend a period of time in the
body of a Hollander [laughter]; of Beaman,[9] one of the lights of your
bar; of Evarts, who, whether as statesman or as orator, delights in
making historic periods. And this year you have favored us with General
Porter,[10] whom we have been trying to capture for our annual dinner,
it seems to me, ever since the Mayflower entered Plymouth Bay.
We have condoled with these honored guests as they with tears have told
us of their pitiful lot, have narrated to us how, when they might have
been tilling the soil (or what passes for soil) of the New Hampshire
hills, shearing their lambs, manipulating their shares (with the aid of
plough-handles), and watering their stock at the nearest brook, and
might have been on speaking acquaintance with the Ten Commandments and
have indulged a hope of some day going to heaven, and possibly to Boston
[laughter]--on the other hand, a hard fate has compelled them to be
millionaires, living in palaces on Murray Hill, to confine their
agricultural operations to the Swamp, and to eke out a precarious
livelihood by buying what they do not want and selling what they have
not got. [Laughter and applause.] Remembering this debt, I thought that
it was at least due to you that, in recognition of your courtesy, I
should come over and confess judgment, and put you out of suspense by
telling you at once that the assets will not pay for the expenses of
distribution. The best I can do is to make you a preferred creditor.
[Laughter.] I have heard that an Israelite without guile, doing business
down in Chatham Street, called his creditors together, and offered them
in settlement his note for ten per cent, on their claims, payable in
four months. His brother, one of the largest creditors, rather "kicked";
but the debtor took him aside and said, "Do not make any objections,
and I will make you a preferred creditor." [Laughter and applause.] So
the proposal was accepted by all. Presently, the preferred brother said,
"Well, I should like what is coming to me." "Oh," was the reply, "you
won't get anything; they won't any of them get anything." "But I thought
I was a preferred creditor." "So you are. These notes will not be paid
when they come due; but it will take them four months to find out that
they are not going to get anything. But you know it now; you see you are
preferred." [Renewed laughter.]
In casting about for a subject (in case I should unhappily be called on
to occupy your attention for a moment), I had thought on offering a few
observations upon Plymouth Rock; but I was deterred by a weird and lurid
announcement which I saw in your papers, appearing in connection with
the name of an eminent clothing dealer, which led me to apprehend that
Plymouth Rock was getting tired. [Laughter.] The announcement read,
"Plymouth Rock pants!" I presumed that Plymouth Rock was tired in
advance, at the prospect of being trotted out once more, from the Old
Colony down to New Orleans, thence to San Francisco, thence to the
cities of the unsalted seas, and so on back to the point of departure.
[Great laughter.] Upon fuller examination, I found that the legend read,
"Plymouth Rock pants for $3." It seemed to me that, without solicitation
on my part, there ought to be public spirit enough in this audience to
make up this evening the modest sum which would put Plymouth Rock at
ease. [Great laughter.]
As I look along this board, Mr. President, and gaze upon these faces
radiant with honesty, with industry, with wisdom, with benevolence, with
frugality, and, above all, with a contented and cheerful poverty, I am
led to ask the question, suggested by the topic assigned me in the
programme, "Why are we New Englanders so unpopular?" Why those phrases,
always kept in stock by provincial orators and editors, "the mean
Yankees," "the stingy Yankees," "the close-fisted Yankees," "the
tin-peddling Yankees," and, above all, the terse and condensed
collocation, "those d----d--those blessed Yankees," the blessing being
comprised between two d's, as though conferred by a benevolent doctor of
divinity. [Laughter.] I remember in the olden time, in the years beyond
the flood, when the Presidential office was vacant and James Buchanan
was drawing the salary, at a period before the recollection of any one
present except myself, although possibly my esteemed friend, your
secretary, Mr. Hubbard, may have heard his grandparents speak of it as a
reminiscence of his youth, there was a poem going about, descriptive of
the feelings of our brethren living between us and the Equator, running
somewhat thus:
"'Neath the shade of the gum-tree the Southerner sat,
A-twisting the brim of his palmetto hat,
And trying to lighten his mind of a'load
By humming the words of the following ode:
'Oh! for a nigger, and oh! for a whip;
Oh! for a cocktail, and oh! for a nip;
Oh! for a shot at old Greeley and Beecher;
Oh! for a crack at a Yankee school-teacher.'
And so he kept oh-ing for all he had not,
Not contented with owing for all that he'd got."
Why does the world minify our intelligence by depreciating our favorite
article of diet, and express the ultimate extreme of mental pauperism by
saying of him on whose intellect they would heap contempt, "He doesn't
know beans"? [Laughter.] And it is within my recollection that there was
a time when it was proposed to reconstruct the Union of the States, with
New England left out. Why, I repeat it, the intense unpopularity of New
England?
For one thing, it seems to me, we are hated because of our virtues; we
are ostracized because men are tired of hearing about "New England, the
good." The virtues of New England seem to italicize the moral poverty of
mankind at large. The fact that the very first act of our foremothers,
even before the landing was made, two hundred and sixty-nine years ago,
was to go on shore and do up the household linen, which had suffered
from the voyage of ninety days, is a perpetual reproof to those nations
among whom there is a great opening for soap, who have a great many
saints' days, but no washing day. [Laughter and applause.] When men
nowadays are disposed to steal a million acres from the Indians, it
detracts from their enjoyment to read what Governor Josiah Winslow wrote
in _1676_: "I think I can clearly say that, before the present troubles
broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony
but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian
proprietors." When our fellow-citizens of other States look at their
public buildings, every stone in which tells of unpaid loans; when they
remember how they have scaled and scaled the unfortunate people who were
guilty of the crime of having money to lend, until the creditors might
be considered obnoxious to the Mosaic law, which looked with disfavor
upon scaleless fish, it is naturally aggravating to them to remember
that, at the close of King Philip's war, Plymouth Colony was owing a
debt more than equal to the personal property of the colony, and that
the debt was paid to the last cent [applause]; to remember the time, not
very far gone by, when the Bay State paid the interest on her bonds in
gold, though it cost her two hundred and seventy-six cents on every
dollar to do it, and when it was proposed to commend the bonds of the
United States to the bankers of the world by placing upon them the
indorsement of Massachusetts [applause]; to remember that never has New
England learned to articulate the letters that spell the word
"Repudiation." [Great applause.]
To those members of the human family who are disposed to entertain too
high an estimate of themselves there is something aggravating in the
extreme humility and sensitive self-depreciation of the real New
Englander.
And the virtues of New England are all the more offensive because they
are exhibited in such a way as to take from her enemies the comfort that
grows out of a grievance. Said a Chicago wife, "It is real mean for
Charlie to be so good to me; I want to get a divorce and go on the
stage; but he is so kind I cannot help loving him, and that is what
makes me hate him so." When there comes the news that some far-off
region is desolated by fire, or flood, or tempest, or pestilence, the
first thing is a meeting in the metropolis of New England, and the
dispatching of food and funds and physicians and nurses; and the
relieved sufferers are compelled to murmur, "Oh, dear, it is too bad! We
want to hate them, and they won't let us." [Applause.]
One can manage to put up with goodness, however, if it is not too
obtrusive. The honored daughter of Connecticut, the author of "Uncle
Tom" and "Dred," now in the peaceful evening of her days,[11] has said,
"What is called goodness is often only want of force." A good man,
according to the popular idea, is a man who doesn't get in anybody's
way. But the restless New Englanders not only have virtues, but they
have convictions which are perpetually asserting themselves in the most
embarrassing manner. [Applause.] I pass over the time, two centuries
ago, when Cromwell and Hampden, those New Englanders who have never seen
New England, made themselves exceedingly offensive to Charles I, and
gave him at last a practical lesson touching the continuity of the
spinal column.
Later, when our fellow-citizens desired to "wallop their own niggers,"
and to carry the patriarchal institution wherever the American flag
went, they were naturally irritated at hearing that there was a handful
of meddling fanatics down in Essex County who, in their misguided and
malevolent ingenuity, had invented what they called liberty and human
rights. [Applause.] Presently, when it was proposed (under the
inspiration of a man recently deceased, who will stand in history as a
monument to the clemency and magnanimity of a great and free people) to
break up the Union in order to insure the perpetuity of slavery, then a
man, plain of speech, rude of garb[12] descended from the Lincolns of
Hingham, in Plymouth County, sounded a rally for Union and freedom
[tremendous applause]; and, hark! there is the tramp, tramp of the
fishermen from Marblehead; there are the Connecticut boys from old
Litchfield; and there is the First Rhode Island; and there are the
sailors from Casco Bay; and the farmers' sons from old Coos, and from
along the Onion River, their hearts beating with the enthusiasm of
liberty, while their steps keep pace with the drum-beat that salutes the
national flag. [Applause.] And, see! is that a thunder-cloud in the
North? No, it is the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, made up of American
citizens of African descent, officered by the best blood of Suffolk, and
at their head Robert G. Shaw, going down to die in the trenches before
Fort Wagner. And there is the man whom a kindly Providence yet spares to
us, descended from the Shermans of Connecticut, preparing for the march
that is to cleave the Confederacy in twain. [Cheers for General
Sherman.] And there is the silent man, eight generations removed from
Matthew Grant (who landed at Dorchester in 1630), destined to make the
continent secure for liberty and to inaugurate the New South, dating
from Appomattox, with traditions of freedom, teeming with a prosperity
rivalling that of New England, a prosperity begotten of the marriage of
labor and intelligence. [Continued applause.]
In times somewhat more recent, when a political campaign was under full
headway, and when politicians were husbanding truth with their wonted
frugality and dispensing fiction with their habitual lavishness, there
sprung up a man removed by only two generations from the Lows of Salem,
who, in the resources of a mind capable of such things, devised what he
was pleased to call "Sunday-school politics"; who has had the further
hardihood to be made president of the college which is the glory of your
metropolis, designing, no doubt, to infuse into the mind of the tender
youth of the New Amsterdam his baleful idea, which, so far as I can make
out, has as its essence the conduct of political affairs on the basis of
the Decalogue.
The campaign over, when the victors are rolling up their sleeves and are
preparing to dispense the spoils according to the hunger and thirst of
their retainers, to their amazed horror there is heard the voice of a
native of Rhode Island, who has conceived a scheme almost too monstrous
for mention, which he designates "Civil Service Reform," and who with
characteristic effrontery has got up a society, of which he is
president, for the purpose of diffusing his blood-curdling sentiments.
Do we need to look further for a reply to the question, "Why are the New
Englanders unpopular?" Almost any man is unpopular who goes around with
his pockets full of moral dynamite. [Applause.]
But perhaps I have not yet reached the most essential cause of the
odium. Men will forgive a man almost anything if he only fails; but we,
alas! have committed the crime of success. [Laughter and applause.] It
makes people angry when they see New England prospering, influential,
the banker of the country, leading public sentiment, shaping
legislation. Men would not mind so much if this success were attained
by a happy accident, or were the result of a favoring fortune; but it is
aggravating to see the New Englanders, to whom Providence has given
nothing but rocks and ice and weather--a great deal of it--and a
thermometer [laughter], yet mining gold in Colorado, chasing the walrus
off the Aleutian Islands, building railroads in Dakota, and covering
half the continent with insurance, and underlying it with a mortgage.
Success is the one unpardonable crime. [Renewed laughter and applause.]
It is true, when a man has so far acknowledged his participation in the
common frailty as to die, then men begin to condone his faults; and by
the time he is dead one or two hundred years they find him quite
tolerable. An eminent ecclesiastic in the Anglican Church recently
pronounced the greatest of the Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, "the most
righteous ruler England ever had." A man who is dead is out of the way.
We live in the home which he built, and are not disturbed by the chips
and sawdust and noise, and perhaps the casualties and mistakes, which
attended its building. I will offer a definition (without charge) to the
editors of the magnificent "Century Dictionary": "Saint--a man with
convictions, who has been dead a hundred years; canonized now,
cannonaded then." [Laughter and applause.]
We are building monuments now to the Abolitionists. It is quite possible
that when a hundred winters shall have shed their snows upon the lonely
grave at North Elba, the Old Dominion will take pride in the fact that
she for a little while gave a home to the latest--I trust not the
last--of the Puritans; and the traveller, in 1959, as he goes through
Harper's Ferry, may see upon the site of the old engine-house, looking
out upon the regenerate Commonwealth, cunningly graven in bronze, copied
perhaps from the bust in your own Union League, the undaunted features
of John Brown. [Applause.] And the South that is to be, standing
uncovered beside the grave of the Union soldier, will say: "It was for
us, too, that he died," and will render beside the tomb in the capital
city of Illinois a reverence akin to that which she pays amid the shades
of Mount Vernon. [Great applause.]
The Czar of to-day honors the memory of John Howard (who died a hundred
years ago next January), and offers 15,000 roubles for an essay on his
life; but when George Kennan, following in the steps of Howard, draws
back the curtain and shows the shuddering horrors in the prisons of
Siberia, the Czar would willingly offer much more than 15,000 roubles
for a successful essay upon his life. John Howard sleeps in innocuous
silence at Kherson; George Kennan speaks through the everywhere-present
press to the court of last appeal, the civilized world. [Applause.]
There was not much money, there was not much popularity then, in being a
Puritan, in being a Pilgrim; there is not much profit, there is not much
applause, in being to-day a son of the Puritans, in standing as they did
for great ideas and convictions, for liberty and righteousness, in
holding the same relation to our age that they held to theirs. But let
us be satisfied if, through unpopularity and loneliness and obloquy, we
shall have done our duty as they did theirs, and let us hope that when
another hundred years have passed, and when the ideal of to-day has
become the commonplace of to-morrow, another generation may write over
your grave and mine, "A Son of the Puritans."