[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the seventy-first annual
dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December
22, 1876. The President, William Borden, gave the fifth regular toast,
to which Dr. Hale responded, as follows: "New England Culture--the
open secret of her greatness."
"Yet on her rocks, and on her sands,
And wintry hills the school-house stands,
And what her rugged soil denies,
The harvest of the mind supplies.
The riches of the Commonwealth
Are free strong minds and hearts of health
And, more to her than gold or grain
The cunning hand and cultured brain."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--You seem to have a very frank way
of talking about each other among yourselves here. I observe that I am
the first stranger who has crossed the river which, I recollect Edward
Winslow says, divides the Continent of New England from the Continent of
America [laughter], and, as a stranger, it is my pleasure and duty at
once to express the thanks and congratulations of the invited guest here
for the distinguished care which has been taken on this occasion
outdoors to make us feel entirely at home. [Laughter.] As I came down in
the snow-storm, I could not help feeling that Elder Brewster, and
William Bradford, and Carver, and Winslow could not have done better
than this in Plymouth; and indeed, as I ate my pork and beans just now,
I felt that the Gospel of New England is extending beyond the
Connecticut to other nations, and that what is good to eat and drink in
Boston is good to eat and drink even here on this benighted point at
Delmonico's. [Laughter.]
When you talk to us about "culture," that is rather a dangerous word. I
am always a little afraid of the word "culture." I recollect the very
brightest squib that I read in the late election campaign--and as the
President says, gentlemen, I am going to respect the proprieties of the
occasion. It was sent to one of the journals from the Western Reserve;
and the writer, who, if I have rightly guessed his name, is one of the
most brilliant of our younger poets, was descanting on the Chinook
vocabulary, in which a Chinook calls an Englishman a Chinchog to this
day, in memory of King George. And this writer says that when they have
a young chief whose war-paint is very perfect, whose blanket is
thoroughly embroidered, whose leggins are tied up with exactly the right
colors, and who has the right kind of star upon his forehead and cheeks,
but who never took a scalp, never fired an arrow, and never smelled
powder, but was always found at home in the lodges whenever there was
anything that scented of war--he says the Chinooks called that man by
the name of "Boston Cultus." [Applause and laughter.] Well, now,
gentlemen, what are you laughing at? Why do you laugh? Some of you had
Boston fathers, and more of you had Boston mothers. Why do you laugh?
Ah! you have seen these people, as I have seen them, as everybody has
seen them--people who sat in Parker's and discussed every movement of
the campaign in the late war, and told us that it was all wrong, that we
were going to the bad, but who never shouldered a musket. They are
people who tell us that the emigration, that the Pope of Rome, or the
German element, or the Irish element, is going to play the dogs with our
social system, and yet they never met an emigrant on the wharf or had a
word of comfort to say to a foreigner. We have those people in Boston.
You may not have them in New York, and I am very glad if you have not;
but if you are so fortunate, it is the only place on God's earth where I
have not found such people. [Laughter and applause.] But there is
another kind of culture which began even before there was any
Boston--for there was such a day as that. [Laughter.] There were ten
years in the history of this worlds ten long years, too, before Boston
existed, and those are the years between Plymouth Rock and the day when
some unfortunate men, not able to get to Plymouth Rock, stopped and
founded that city. [Laughter.] This earlier culture is a culture not of
the schoolhouse, or of the tract, but a culture as well of the church,
of history, of the town-meeting, as John Adams says; that nobler culture
to which my friend on the right has alluded when he says that it is born
of the Spirit of God--the culture which has made New England, which is
born of God, and which it is our mission to carry over the world.
[Applause.]
In the very heart of that culture--representing it, as I think, in a
very striking way, half-way back to the day we celebrate--Ezra Styles,
one of the old Connecticut men, published a semi-centennial address. It
seems strange that they should have centennials then, but they had. He
published a semi-centennial address in the middle of the last century,
on the condition of New England, and the prospects before her. He
prophesied what New England was to be in the year 1852. He calculated
the population descending from the twenty thousand men who emigrated in
the beginning, and he calculated it with great accuracy. He said, "There
will be seven million men, women, and children, descended from the men
who came over with Winslow and with Winthrop," and it proved that he was
perfectly right. He went on to sketch the future of New England when
these seven million should crowd her hillsides, her valleys, her farms,
and her shops all over the four States of New England. For it didn't
occur to him, as he looked forward, that one man of them all would ever
go west of Connecticut, or west of Massachusetts. [Applause.] He cast
his horoscope for a population of seven million people living in the old
New England States, in the midst of this century. He did not read, as my
friend here does, the missionary spirit of New England. He did not know
that they would be willing to go across the arm of the ocean which
separated the Continent of New England from the Continent of America.
[Laughter.] All the same, gentlemen, seven million people are somewhere,
and they have not forgotten the true lessons which make New England what
she is. They tell me there are more men of New England descent in San
Francisco than in Boston to-day. All those carried with them their
mothers' lessons, and they mean their mothers' lessons shall bear fruit
away out in Oregon, in California, in South Carolina, in Louisiana.
[Applause.] They have those mothers' lessons to teach them to do
something of what we are trying to do at home in this matter.
[Applause.] We have been so fortunate in New England in this Centennial
year that we are able to dedicate a noble monument of the past to the
eternal memory of the Pilgrim principle. We have been so fortunate that
we are able to consecrate the old South Meeting-House in Boston to the
cause of fostering this Pilgrim principle [applause], that it may be
from this time forward a monument, not of one branch of the Christian
religion, not of one sect or another, but of that universal religion,
that universal patriotism, which has made America, and which shall
maintain America. [Applause.] For myself, I count it providential that
in this Centennial year of years this venerable monument, that monument
whose bricks and rafters are all eloquent of religion and liberty, that
that monument has passed from the possession of one sect and one State
to belong to the whole nation, to be consecrated to American liberty,
and to nothing but American liberty. [Applause.] I need not say--for it
is taken for granted when such things are spoken of--that when it was
necessary for New England to act at once for the security of this great
monument, we had the active aid and hearty assistance of the people of
New York, who came to us and helped us and carried that thing right
through. [Applause.] I am surrounded here with the people who had to do
with the preservation of that great monument for the benefit of the
history of this country for ever.
Let me say, in one word, what purposes it is proposed this great
monument shall serve, for I think they are entirely in line with what we
are to consider to-night. We propose to establish here what I might
fairly call a university for the study of the true history of this
country. And we propose, in the first place, to make that monument of
the past a great Santa Croce, containing the statues and portraits of
the men who have made this country what it is. Then we propose to
establish an institute for the people of America from Maine to San
Francisco, the people of every nationality and every name; and we hope
that such societies as this, and all others interested in the progress
and preservation of the interest of our country, will aid us in the
work. [Applause.] For we believe that the great necessity of this hour
is that higher education in which this people shall know God's work with
man. We hope that the Forefathers' societies, the Sam Adams clubs, the
Centennial clubs over the land, shall make the State more proud of its
fathers, and more sure of the lessons which they lived. We mean by the
spoken voice and by the most popular printed word, circulated
everywhere, to instil into this land that old lesson of New England
culture. We stand by the side of those of you who believe in compulsory
education. We desire, in looking to the future, that the determination
shall be made here by us, as it has been in England, that every child
born on American soil shall learn to read and write. [Applause.]
But there is a great deal more to be taught than that. There is a great
deal which the common school does not teach and cannot teach, when it
teaches men to read. We not only want to teach them to read, but we want
to teach them what is worth reading. And we want to instil the
principles by which the nation lives. We have got to create in those who
came from the other side of the water the same loyalty to the whole of
American principles that each man feels to his native country.
What is this Constitution for which we have been fighting, and which
must be preserved? It is a most delicate mutual adjustment of the powers
and rights of a nation, among and because of the powers and rights of
thirty or forty States. It exists because they exist. That it may stand,
you need all their mutual rivalries, you need every sentiment of local
pride, you need every symbol and laurel of their old victories and
honors. You need just this homestead feeling which to-night we are
cherishing.
But that balance is lost, that whole system is thrown out of gear, if
the seven million people of foreign parentage here are indifferent to
the record of New York as they are to that of Illinois, to that of
Illinois as to that of Louisiana, to that of Louisiana as to that of
Maine; if they have no local pride; if to them the names of Montgomery,
of John Hancock, of Samuel Adams, have no meaning, no association with
the past. [Applause.] Unless they also acquire this local feeling,
unless they share the pride and reverence of the native American for the
State in which he is born, for the history which is his glory, all these
delicate balances and combinations are worthless, all your revolving
planets fall into your sun! It is the national education in the
patriotism of the Fathers, an education addressing itself to every man,
woman, and child from Katahdin to the Golden Gate--it is this, and only
this, which will insure the perpetuity of your republic. [Applause.]
Now, gentlemen, if you would like to try an experiment in this matter,
go into one of your public schools, next week, and ask what Saratoga
was, and you will be told it is a great watering-place where people go
to spend money. You will find there is not one in ten who will be able
to tell you that there the Hessian was crushed, and foreign bayonets
forever driven from the soil of New York. [Applause.] Ask about
Brandywine, the place where Lafayette shed his young blood, where a
little handful of American troops were defeated, yet, although they were
defeated, broke the force of the English army for one critical year. Put
the word Brandywine in one of your public schools, and you will see that
the pupils laugh at the funny conjunction of the words "brandy" and
"wine," but they can tell you nothing about the history which made the
name famous. It seems to me it is dangerous to have your children
growing up in such ignorance of the past. [Applause.] How much did they
know here about the day when, a short time since, you celebrated the
battle of Haarlem Heights, where the British were shown that to land on
American soil was not everything? Is it quite safe for your children to
grow up in ignorance of your past, while you are looking down upon the
century of the future? The great institution we are hoping for in the
future is to carry this New England culture above the mere mathematics
of life, and to incorporate into all education that nobler culture which
made the men who made the Revolution, which made the men who have
sustained this country. [Applause.] We shall ask for the solid
assistance of all the Forefathers' stock in the country to carry out
this great work of national education, and I am quite sure, from what I
have seen here to-night, that we shall not ask in vain. [Applause.]
I ought to apologize for speaking so long. I am conscious of the fact
that I am a fraud, and I am nothing but a fraud. [Laughter.] The truth
is, gentlemen (I say this as I am sitting down), I have no business to
be here at all. I am not a Pilgrim, nor the son of a Pilgrim, nor the
grandson of a Pilgrim; there is not one drop of Pilgrim blood in my
veins. I am a "forefather" myself (for I have six children), but I am
not the son of a forefather. I had one father; most men have [laughter];
I have two grandfathers, I have four great-grandfathers, but I have not
four-fathers. [Laughter.] I want to explain, now, how all this happened,
because something is due to me before you put me out of the room. Like
most men, I had eight great-great-grandfathers--so have you; so have
you. If you run it up, I have got sixty-four great-grandfathers
of the grandfathers of my grandfathers, and I have sixty-four
great-grandmothers of the grandmothers of my grandmothers. There were
one hundred and twenty-eight of these people the day the "Mayflower"
sailed. There were one hundred and twenty-eight of them in England eager
to come over here, looking forward to this moment, gentlemen, when we
meet here at Delmonico's, and they were hoping and praying, every man of
them and every woman of them, that I might be here at this table
to-night [laughter], and they meant me to be; and every one of them
would have come here in the "Mayflower" but for Miles Standish, as I
will explain. The "Mayflower," you know, started from Holland. They had
to go to Holland first to learn the Dutch language. [Laughter.] They
started from Holland, and they came along the English Channel and
stopped at Plymouth in England. They stopped there to get the last
edition of the London "Times" for that day, in order that they might
bring over early copies to the New York "Tribune" and New York "World".
These ancestors of mine, the legend says, were all on the dock at
Plymouth waiting for them. It was a bad night, a very bad night. It
fogged as it can only fog in England. [Laughter.] They waited on the
wharf there two hours, as you wait at the Brooklyn and Jersey ferries,
for the "Mayflower" to come along. Methinks I see her now, the
"Mayflower" of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospect of a fertile
State and bound across an unknown sea. Her dark and weather-beaten form
looms wearily from the deep, when the pilot brings her up at the
Plymouth dock, and a hundred and twenty-eight of my ancestors press
forward. They were handsome men and fair women. When they all pressed
forward, Miles Standish was on hand and met them. He was on board and
looked at them. He went back to the governor, and said, "Here are one
hundred and twenty-eight of as fine emigrants as I ever saw." "Well,"
Governor Carver said, "the capacity of the vessel, as prescribed in the
emigrant act, is already exceeded." Miles Standish said, "I think we
could let them in." The Governor said, "No, they cannot come in." Miles
Standish went back to the gangway, and said, "You are handsome men, but
you can't come in;" and they had to stand there, every man and every
woman of them. [Laughter.]
That is the unfortunate reason why I had no ancestors at the landing of
the Pilgrims. [Laughter.] But my ancestors looked westward still. They
stayed in England, praying that they might come, and when Winthrop, ten
years afterwards, sailed, he took them all on board, and if the little
State of Massachusetts has done anything to carry out the principles of
the men who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, why, some little part of
the credit is due to my humble ancestry. [Laughter and applause.]
* * * * *