[Speech of Edward O. Wolcott at the eighty-second annual dinner of
the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1887.
The President, ex-Judge Horace Russell, introduced the speaker as
follows: "It was an English lawyer who said that the farther he
went West the more he was convinced that the wise men came from the
East. We may not be so thoroughly convinced of this after we have
heard the response to the next regular toast, 'The Pilgrim in the
West.' I beg to introduce Mr. Edward O. Wolcott, of Colorado."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--It was with great diffidence that
I accepted the invitation of your President to respond to a toast
to-night. I realized my incapacity to do justice to the occasion, while
at the same time I recognized the high compliment conveyed. I felt
somewhat as the man did respecting the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy; he
said he didn't know whether Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works or not,
but if he didn't, he missed the greatest opportunity of his life.
[Laughter.]
The West is only a larger, and in some respects a better, New England. I
speak not of those rose gardens of culture, Missouri and Arkansas, but
otherwise, generally of the States and Territories west of the
Mississippi, and more particularly, because more advisedly, of Colorado,
the youngest and most rugged of the-thirty-eight; almost as large in
area as all New England and New York combined; "with room about her
hearth for all mankind"; with fertile valleys, and with mines so rich
and so plentiful that we occasionally, though reluctantly, dispose of
one to our New York friends. [Laughter.] We have no very rich, no very
poor, and no almshouses; and in the few localities where we are not good
enough, New England Home Missionary Societies are rapidly bringing us
up to the Plymouth Rock standard and making us face the Heavenly music.
[Laughter.] We take annually from our granite hills wealth enough to pay
for the fertilizers your Eastern and Southern soils require to save them
from impoverishment. We have added three hundred millions to the coinage
of the world; and, although you call only for gold, we generously give
you silver, too. [Laughter.] You are not always inclined to appreciate
our efforts to swell the circulation, but none the less are we one with
you in patriotic desire to see the revenues reformed, provided always
that our own peculiar industries are not affected. Our mountains slope
toward either sea, and in their shadowy depths we find not only hidden
wealth, but inspiration and incentive to high thought and noble living,
for Freedom has ever sought the recesses of the mountains for her
stronghold, and her spirit hovers there; their snowy summits and the
long, rolling plains are lightened all day long by the sunshine, and we
are not only Colorado, but Colorado Claro! [Applause.]
Practically, as little is known of the great West by you of the East as
was known a century ago of New England by our British cousins. Your
interest in us is, unfortunately, largely the interest on our mortgages,
your attitude toward us is somewhat critical, and the New England heart
is rarely aroused respecting the West except when some noble Indian,
after painting himself and everything else within his reach red, is sent
to his happy hunting grounds. [Laughter.] Yet, toward the savage, as in
all things, do not blame us if we follow the Christian example set us by
our forefathers. We read that the Court at Plymouth, more than fifty
years after the colony was founded, ordered "That whosoever shall shoot
off any gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game whatsoever,
except an Indian or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every such
shot"; and our pious ancestors popped over many an Indian on their way
to Divine worship. [Laughter.] But when in Colorado, settled less than a
generation ago, the old New England heredity works itself out and an
occasional Indian is peppered, the East raises its hands in horror, and
our offending cowboys could not find admittance even to an Andover
Probation Society. [Laughter.]
Where we have a chance to work without precedent, we can point with
pride of a certain sort to methods at least peaceful. When Mexico was
conquered, we found ourselves with many thousand Mexicans on hand. I
don't know how they managed it elsewhere, but in Colorado we not only
took them by the hand and taught them our ways, but both political
parties inaugurated a beautiful and generous custom, since more honored
in the breach than in the observance, which gave these vanquished people
an insight into and an interest in the workings of republican
institutions which was marvellous: a custom of presenting to each head
of a household, being a voter, on election day, from one to five dollars
in our native silver. [Great laughter.]
If Virginia was the mother of Presidents, New England is the mother of
States. Of the population of the Western States born in the United
States, some five per cent, are of New England birth, and of the native
population more than half can trace a New England ancestry. Often one
generation sought a resting-place in Ohio, and its successor in Illinois
or in Iowa, but you will find that the ancestor, less than a century
ago, was a God-fearing Yankee. New England influences everywhere
predominate. I do not mean to say that many men from the South have not,
especially since the war, found homes and citizenship in the West, for
they have; and most of them are now holding Federal offices. [Laughter.]
It is nevertheless true that from New England has come the great, the
overwhelming influence in moulding and controlling Western thought.
[Applause.]
New England thrift, though a hardy plant, becomes considerably modified
when transplanted to the loam of the prairies; the penny becomes the
dime before it reaches the other ocean; Ruth would find rich gleanings
among our Western sheaves, and the palm of forehandedness opens
sometimes too freely under the wasteful example which Nature sets all
over our broad plains; but because the New England ancestor was
acquisitive, his Western descendant secures first of all his own home.
[Applause.] The austere and serious views of life which our forefathers
cherished have given way to a kindlier charity, and we put more hope and
more interrogation points into our theology than our fathers did; but
the old Puritan teachings, softened by the years and by brighter and
freer skies, still keep our homes Christian and our home life pure. And
more, far more than all else, the blood which flows in our veins, the
blood of the sturdy New Englanders who fought and conquered for an idea,
quickened and kindled by the Civil War, has imbued and impregnated
Western men with a patriotism that overrides and transcends all other
emotions. Pioneers in a new land, laying deep the foundations of the
young commonwealths, they turn the furrows in a virgin soil, and from
the seed which they plant there grows, renewed and strengthened with
each succeeding year, an undying devotion to republican institutions,
which shall nourish their children and their children's children
forever. [Prolonged applause.]
An earnest people and a generous! The Civil strife made nothing right
that was wrong before, and nothing wrong that was right before; it
simply settled the question of where the greater strength lay. We know
that
"Who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe,"
and that if more remains to be done, it must come because the hearts of
men are changed. The war is over; the very subject is hackneyed; it is a
tale that is told, and commerce and enlightened self-interest have
obliterated all lines. And yet you must forgive us if, before the
account is finally closed, and the dead and the woe and the tears are
balanced by all the blessings of a reunited country, some of us still
listen for a voice we have not yet heard; if we wait for some Southern
leader to tell us that renewed participation in the management of the
affairs of this nation carries with it the admission that the question
of the right of secession is settled, not because the South was
vanquished, but because the doctrine was and is wrong, forever wrong.
[Great applause.]
We are a plain people, too, and live far away. We find all the
excitement we need in the two great political parties, and rather look
upon the talk of anybody in either party being better than his party, as
a sort of cant. The hypercritical faculty has not reached us yet, and
we leave to you of the East the exclusive occupancy of the raised dais
upon which it seems necessary for the independent voter to stand while
he is counted. [Applause and laughter.]
We are provincial; we have no distinctive literature and no great poets;
our leading personage abroad of late seems to be the Honorable "Buffalo
Bill" [laughter], and we use our adjectives so recklessly that the
polite badinage indulged in toward each other by your New York editors
to us seems tame and spiritless. In mental achievement we may not have
fully acquired the use of the fork, and are "but in the gristle and not
yet hardened into the bone of manhood." We stand toward the East
somewhat as country to city cousins; about as New to Old England, only
we don't feel half so badly about it, and on the whole are rather
pleased with ourselves. [Laughter.] There is not in the whole broad West
a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is not within reach
of it. With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating
and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time
to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All this may not be æsthetic,
but it is virile, and it leads up and not down. Great poets, and those
who so touch the hearts of men that the vibration goes down the ages,
must often find their inspiration when wealth brings leisure to a class,
or must have "learned in suffering what they teach in song." We can wait
for our inspired ones; when they come, the work of this generation,
obscure and commonplace, will have paved the way for them; the general
intelligence diffused in this half century will, unknown or forgotten,
yet live in their numbers, and the vivid imaginations of our New England
ancestors, wasted in depicting the joys and torments of the world to
come, will, modified by the years, beautify and ennoble the cares of
this. [Applause.]
There are some things even more important than the highest culture. The
West is the Almighty's reserve ground, and as the world is filling up.
He is turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres,
and is sending there the rain as well as the sunshine. A high and
glorious destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the
other side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must
find waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy
people:
"Who love the land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a King upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his Majesty."
We are beginning to realize, however, that the invitation we have been
extending to all the world has been rather too general. So far we have
been able to make American citizens in fact as well as name out of the
foreign-born immigrants. The task was light while we had the honest and
industrious to deal with, but the character of some of the present
immigration has brought a conviction which we hope you share, that the
sacred rights of citizenship should be withheld from a certain class of
aliens in race and language, who seek the protection of this Government,
until they shall have at least learned that the red in our flag is
commingled with the white and blue and the stars. [Great applause.]
In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee
reinforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of
them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater.
Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States,
and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in
the future even more than in the past, the heads of the New England
households weary not in the good work. [Laughter and applause.]
In these later days of "booms" and New Souths and Great Wests; when
everybody up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to
apologize for it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a
sort of tendency to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much
considered; and New England being small in area and most of her
distinguished people being dead, she is just now somewhat under an
eclipse. But in her past she has undying fame. You of New England and
her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes
which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity
and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their
sacredness. The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who
make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still
instinct with noble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim
a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that with
each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her
with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet--
"Not by Eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But Westward, look, the land is bright!"
[Hearty applause.]