[Speech of Edward Everett Hale, D.D., at the first annual dinner of the
New England Society in the City of Brooklyn, December 21, 1880. The
President, Benjamin D. Silliman, in proposing the toast, "Boston,"
said: "We are favored with the company of a typical and eloquent
Bostonian, identified with all that is learned and benevolent in that
ancient home of the Puritans, and familiar with all its notions. In
response to the toast, we call on the Rev. Edward Everett Hale."]
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--I am sure that there is not a
Boston boy who hears me to-night who does not recollect that when he
went out to his first Pilgrim dinner, or to see Fanny Kemble or to any
other evening dissipation of fifty years ago, the last admonition of his
mother was, "We will leave the candle burning for you, John, but you
must be sure and be home before twelve o'clock!" I am sure that the
memory of this admonition is lingering among our friends now, that we
are entering on the small hours, and that I must only acknowledge your
courtesy and sit down. I feel, indeed, all along in your talk of hoar
antiquity, that I owe my place here only to your extreme hospitality. In
these aged cities you may well say to me, "You Bostonians are children.
You are of yesterday," as the Egyptians said to the Greek traveller. For
we are still stumbling along like little children, in the anniversaries
of our quarter-millennium; but we understand perfectly well that the
foundations of this city were laid in dim antiquity. I know that nobody
knows when Brooklyn was founded. Your commerce began so long ago that
nobody can remember it, but I know that there was a beaver trap on every
brook in Kings County, while Boston was still a howling wilderness.
These noble ancestors of yours had made themselves at home on Plymouth
Rock before we had built a flat-boat on any river in Massachusetts Bay.
[Applause.]
It is only as the youngest daughter, quite as a Cinderella, that we of
Boston have any claim on your matchless hospitality. But, as Cinderella
should, we have done our best at home to make ready our sisters when
they should go to the ball. When my brother Beecher, just now, closed
his speech with a Latin quotation, I took some satisfaction in
remembering that we taught him his Latin at the Boston Latin school. And
I could not but remember when I listened with such delight to the
address of Mr. Secretary Evarts, which you have just now been cheering,
that the first time I heard this persuasive and convincing orator, was
when he took the prize for elocution, a boy of thirteen, on the platform
in the great hall in our old schoolhouse in School Street. Nay, I
confess also, to a little feeling of local as well as national pride,
when the President of the United States [Rutherford B. Hayes] was
speaking. Just as he closes this remarkable administration, which is
going to stand out in history, distinguished indeed among all
administrations from the beginning, so pure has it been, so honorable
and so successful--just as he closes this administration he makes here
this statement of the principles on which are based the success of an
American statesman, in a few fit words so epigrammatic that they will be
cited as proverbs by our children and our children's children. I heard
that masterly definition of the laws which have governed the New
Englander, I took pride in remembering that the President also was a
graduate of our law school. These three are the little contributions
which Cinderella has been preparing in the last half-century, for the
first dinner-party of the Brooklyn Pilgrim Society. [Applause.]
I read in a New York newspaper in Washington the other day that
something done in Boston lately was done with the "usual Boston
intensity." I believe the remark was not intended to be a compliment,
but we shall take it as one, and are quite willing to accept the phrase.
I think it is true in the past, I hope it will be true in the future,
that we go at the things which we have to do with a certain intensity,
which I suppose we owe to these Puritan Fathers whom to-night we are
celebrating. Certainly we have gone at this business of emigration with
that intensity. It is perfectly true that there are in Brooklyn to-day
more people than there are in Boston, who were born in Boston from the
old New England blood. Not that Brooklyn has been any special favorite.
When I met last year in Kansas, a mass meeting of twenty-five thousand
of the old settlers and their children, my daughter said to me: "Papa, I
am glad to see so many of our own countrymen." She certainly had never
seen so many before, without intermixture of people of foreign races.
Now it is certainly our wish to carry that intensity into everything. If
the thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing thoroughly. What we do
we mean to do it for everybody. You have seen the result. We try, for
instance, if we open a Latin school at all, to have it the best Latin
school in the world. And then we throw it open to everybody, to native
and heathen, to Jew and to Greek, to white and black and red, and we
advise you to go and do likewise. [Applause.]
You recollect the old joke, I think it began with Preston of South
Carolina, that Boston exported no articles of native growth but granite
and ice. That was true then, but we have improved since, and to these
exports we have added roses and cabbages. Mr. President, they are good
roses, and good cabbages, and I assure you that the granite is excellent
hard granite, and the ice is very cold ice. [Laughter and applause.]