ern America in those latitudes. The "Bacalaos," as the fishermen called Newfound land and the adjacent shores, had been discovered by the Northmen and the Cabots. Florida, as far north as San Augustine, had been discovered and mapped by the Spaniards. It did not require much ingenuity in Verazzano to follow Marco Polo in saying that there was a mainland running all along from Florida to the Bacalaos, as there is. But when the poor pirate came to tell his story, he put in his lie with a circumstance, and gave us this stuff about the roses and the lilies and the dried grapes on Block Island.

been there, and Mrs. Parsons who keeps it had been alive, why he would not have found roses and lilies. No! But he would have found Pyxanthera in blossom,

as I have this eleventh day of March. He would have had first-rate coffee and bread and milk and cream, and omelettes, and Barnegat oysters, and other things to refresh him after a sea-voyage. I am not sure that he would have ever gone back to Dieppe or its belongings. Then he would never have written any letter, nor would his celebrated lie ever have troubled the historians. But none of these things happened, and Mrs. Parsons, and the omelettes, and the blazing stars, and the oysters, are reserved for Miss Reader and the Traveller of to-day.

Τ'

HE NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE'S Counting-room, with an ingenuity which even editorial modesty must admire, has recently evolved for its bold advertising purposes a map of the United States, in which New England appears lifted bodily out of its far-off corner, and set down plump in the middle of the republic, a bright spot in a sorely shady and needy-looking country, to whose extremes she is radiating philosophy and art and the sundry excellent things, including capital,-whether religion, we do not remember. The editors suspect that the counting-room meant that the great public should read the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE in this luminous New England spot in the "dark continent"; and for such high and clearly disinterested appreciation they are, of course, humbly grateful. Of the influences of New England upon the whole country, they themselves have a decidedly proud estimate, as what good New Englander has not? And, adopting in mild manner the pictured parable, it may be said that among the most efficient carriers and radiators of the New England light and influence are the various New England societies which exist in almost every great city in the republic. New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and a score of cities, have their New England societies,

- societies of men whose roots were in New England, and who, leading and loyal men in their adopted places, still look back fondly to New England as the "old home." Forefathers' Day is pre-eminently the time when these Western and Southern New Englanders give full scope to the New England sentiment in them- usually over very good dinners. The Forefathers' Day speeches at the dinners of these various New England societies are, to our thinking, among the best speeches of the year, the wide world over. The NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE, which hopes to make itself precious in the eyes of every member of a New England society, means to spread its net each year for these speeches, and cull from the best of them for its readers. We think that on the last Forefathers' Day no better speeches were made than those at the dinner of the St. Louis New England Society, which is a society, we think, of nearly two hundred members, now under the presidency of Mr. Henry Hitchcock. That is certainly a fortunate gathering which, with other attractions, has Professor James K. Hosmer to speak to it upon New England and Old England, and Charles Dudley Warner to speak of the general influence of the Pilgrim spirit upon the country, and especially upon the great West. It is not fitting that so good a speech

as that of Mr. Warner's should be lost in the newspapers, or buried in a society report, and we rescue it and give it here:

"IT is a very inspiring sight to see so many people who are either Yankees, or have the grace to wish to be thought so on this occasion. I was told that our learned and brilliant president had the irreparable misfortune at an early period of his life not to be born in New England. That, however, is an error which he has measurably atoned for by having an ancestry among the most honored in the Pilgrim annals. I know it was respectable, because my mother's name was the one which your president has added so much honor to. Not only has he had that ancestry, but he has had the wisdom to see how the country was going, as they say in election phrase, that it was going New England; and he has had the wisdom in his day to get on the right side openly and publicly, and to be a New Englander. He has come into the majority - and this has nothing to do with the speech, but I happen to think about it a little differently from what a colored brother did the other day in Macon, Georgia. They make majorities differently down there. There was an indictment of a white man for an election fraud, and the evidence of his guilt was so plain that it was necessary, in order to get along well, to have the jury a little looked to. In point of fact, everybody who was too much colored was challenged off except one old darkey, who remained. The eleven jurors, when they retired, considered how they should present the appearance of the ordinary jury and still set free the acknowledged guilty prisoner. So, when they came into the jury room, they moved, in the first place, that they elect a foreman, and that the foreman should not have a vote except in case of a tie. That struck the colored brother as a fair arrangement and he voted for it. Then they elected Uncle Remus foreman, and then they balloted - and there were eleven for acquittal, and, of course, there was no tie! When the foreman, in the suitable pride of his office, came into court and was asked for his verdict he said, 'If the Court please, the jury am gone democratic.'

"I did not know until I came here that this was to be a mixed assembly. I should have liked it, of course, better, and been more attracted toward it, if I had known it in advance. I have always understood, indeed I knew, from my grandmother, who lived in Kingston, hard by Plymouth, and who, when a little girl, heard the sound of the cannon at the battle of Bunker Hill, that the Mayflower company was rather mixed; and that they went in as they did in the Ark, more or less, two and two, and that Woman played a considerably important part in the early transactions. Men talk a great deal about the Pilgrim Fathers - a great deal - a great deal that might be repeated, and generally is repeated year after year, and very little about the Pilgrim mothers. Who was it that said the Pilgrim mothers ought to have an innings now?- and I hope they will for a century or so, because they suffered as much as the Pilgrim Fathers did; that is to say, they had to endure everything that the Pilgrim Fathers endured - and the Pilgrim father besides.

"Now, the Pilgrim has been lauded, attacked, and defended until, I suppose, there is nothing new to say about him or about his achievements; and for this and other reasons I am going to invite your attention for a few moments to a line of thought parallel, but perhaps a little different from the set eulogy of the ancestry of which I am so justly proud, and you are.

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The West is always the child of the East. Civilization, we say, marches westward. This is not only a line of march, but usually of development. We do not mean that civilization deserts its eastern home, but that it spreads, sends out pickets and conquering armies westward. That has been the course in the history of the races to which we belong and are allied. This gives to the East the appearance of being conservative, to the West of being progressive. But it is always one continuous line, and we cannot actually break with traditions.

"On this day we are called to celebrate both the character and influence of the Pilgrims, and the development and prospects of their descendants. At such a time there is always a tendency to exaggerate the character under consideration, to heighten his traits good and bad, to regard him as an exceptional phenomenon. The Pilgrim of Plymouth and the colonizer of Massachusetts was not a new species or a strange creature in the world, an isolated discoverer and experimenter without a past. He was simply a man, bound as we are by traditions, the product of a long struggle, in one stage of his evolution and under new conditions. He was a Teutonic man, strong, questioning, doubting, cultivating the type of individualism, awaiting his orders from a higher power not of this world, conveyed, however, through the medium of his own judging and approving soul. On his religious side he was the offspring of the Reformation, with its assertion of individual responsibility; on the political side, the child of the free Germanic spirit which was never conquered, which alone was able to cope with the organization and discipline of Rome, which in the Alemanni planted in Switzerland the democracy that in its fastnesses has resisted till to-day the force and the diplomacy of Europe. His religion and his politics were in fact one and the same thing. Tried and harassed in England for his opinions, and for the eccentricities into which freedom of opinion is likely to run, he rekindled his faith and his spirit in Holland and Geneva, and sought a new world to find room for his growth.

"Fortunately for us his discipline continued here. No well-informed man would expect to found an empire in the sands of Plymouth or among the rocks of Salem; none but a man of the most tough and virile qualities could have sustained himself there. The Great Creator must have had a mind to test the fibre of his children when he sent them to New England. He had, we must suppose, work for them to do that required, in order to bring out the proper qualities, a conflict with a climate that needs constant attention, and with a soil reluctant to the point of niggardliness to yield anything. The Pilgrim, who looked only for a better country, even a heavenly, probably did not know this, nor appreciate the fact that his training was intended to make him and his descendants such men that conflict with any other

climate and soil would be only a delightful recreation. Quite possibly his virility would have softened and his aggressive heroism would have melted away in a more genial condition, and the course of history would have changed if the Mayflower had landed south of Long Island. But, after subduing New England, it was mere play to run over the rest of the continent.

"With climate and new physical conditions and in isolation, the evolution of the Teutonic race in New England went on. In all history there is nothing more interesting than the study of this evolution. There was from the first an uncommon accent laid on duty, and an exaggerated development of conscience. So much conscience had he that he had plenty to spare for others less fortunate, and his sense of duty and his conceit of his own rectitude made him not slow to impose it upon others. But whatever formulas he cast for himself and imposed upon others, it was quite certain that his individualism, which made him intolerant, would eventually work out into the widest liberty. And he did go through the furnace of Jonathan Edwards, logically, into new and enlarging freedom. But in this as in his political action he followed his traditions and the laws of his being, not suddenly, or by breaking with his past, but in a true evolutionary movement. There were for him only two persons in the universe- himself and his Creator. It was probably the habit of a form of speech that made him in Mayflower compact acknowledge any other earthly sovereign than himself. But, presently, on the banks of the Connecticut, was developed the true democratic federal idea of government, and Thomas Hooker, the founder of American democracy, acknowledged no sovereign above the consent of the people, except the Most High. In the government by the three independent river towns with elected representatives in a general court, we have the exact and first prototype of our indestructible federal Union of indestructible states; and when the framers of the constitution were likely to split asunder on the vital question of state and federal authority, it was this "Connecticut Compromise" that saved them. Yet the underlying idea was only a natural evolution of the town democratic idea which the settlers brought with them. Teutonic, or English, or whatever it was, it was a growth and not an invention of the moment. As has been pointed out, the contrivance with which we attempted to place ourselves as a nation, after the war of independence, namely, the confederation, an invention of our own, without any roots in the past, any tradition, was a dead failure. In our constitution we simply fell into line again. Hooker's suggestion both of a government only by the consent of the people and the federal idea was a new thing, but it was in the inevitable line of development.

"The early New Englanders had many distinguishing characteristics, traits that marked them for distinction in an age of great ferment and experiment. One was faith in God, and the belief that they were His chosen people and instruments; and, allied to this, the notion, that the best that is, those best informed in the Divine purpose should rule. There was immense governmental vigor in this faith, and considerable in this belief, and it has not yet wholly spent itself. The New

England theocratic government is as interesting a chapter in human history as that elaborated in the Old Testament. But, after all, the distinguishing trait of the New Englander was his respect for law; that is, his individual submission to the tribunal of the organized justice of society. There have been remarkable civilizations where this respect for law was lacking to a great degree, civilization producing a most charming society, delightful men and women, a keen sense of personal honor, a high degree of polish and refinement. But, wanting that pervading reliance upon law which takes from the individual the private administration and revenge, they have been unstable, liable to the sudden outbreak of frightful tragedies, of disturbances which make the whole social state insecure. It is the special glory of the Pilgrim that wherever he dwelt, and over the wide spaces where his influence has been paramount, there has existed a profound respect for law. This has been the mighty force, this intelligent submission of the individual to the necessities of high social order, that has kept all the vast region, north of the Ohio, and away onward to the Pacific, steady in its wonderful growth, notwithstanding the disorganizing tendencies of pioneer life, of frontier aggressions, of foreign admixture. This order, this vital faithfulness to discipline, this social integrity, you expect to find in every community settled by New Englanders. You may find in it many other traits, or survivals or exaggerations of traits, that you do not like, shrewdness, for instance, developed into overreaching; but this necessary fundamental law you do find. If the Pilgrim's neighbor injured him, he did not try to settle the difficulty with a shotgun; he referred it to a town-meeting.

"The Pilgrim was a great figure in his day. The same figure would not be so imposing in our day, nor could the best man of that day deal with the problems of this. Why? Because, for one reason, James Watt, in Glasgow, in 1761, invented the high-pressure engine. That application of steam to overcome inertia and the law of gravitation changed the face of the world. Not only that, but it compelled the reorganization of society. It did not simply make possible the continued union of these states (impossible to be conceived of with science at the point it was in our colonial state), but it created, it is still creating, a new society that and the modern applications of electricity. Fancy what chance there was of continuing a union of common aspiration, of sympathy, of interest, in the year 1800, when it took twenty-two days to convey the mail from New York to Nashville. The best wagon roads ever constructed would not have sufficed, in time or capacity, for exchanging products between the Atlantic States and the Mississippi Valley—a ready and quick exchange as necessary to a political as to a commercial union. Local development and self-sufficiency would have driven the states apart, not kept them together. Roman roads interlacing the vast area of our country, with Roman soldiers stationed at all commanding points, would have made for a time an empire possible, never a federal republic. Steam is a notice to a soldier to quit. For a time it has facilitated his operations and made them more terrible, but nothing is more certain in the evolu