they remember that this is washing-day. [Laughter.]

I am aware that the occasion is so large as to dwarf all merely personal
considerations; but I cannot omit to return you my thanks for the
unmerited kindness which has placed me in the position I occupy. I must
add that the position is at once the more honorable and the more
onerous, because I am called to follow a gentleman whose administration
of the office has been so superlatively successful.

In making this allusion to my honored predecessor, I am reminded of an
event in which we all feel a common pride. On the 25th of last June,
amid the hills which overshadow Dartmouth College, our then president
laid the corner-stone of "Rollins Chapel" for Christian worship, while
on the same day, at the same place, on the grounds traversed in earlier
years by Webster and Choate, another son of New England laid the
corner-stone of the "Wilson Library Building." Thus does intelligent
industry, large-hearted benevolence, and filial piety, plant upon the
granite hills of New England the olive-groves of Academus and the palms
of Judea. [Applause.]

But perhaps there may be here some intelligent stranger who asks me to
define an expression which is now and then heard on these occasions:
"What is this New England of which you speak so seldom and so
reluctantly? Is it a place?" Yes, it is a place; not indeed only a
place, but it is a place; and he cannot know New England who has not
traversed it from Watch Hill to Mount Washington, from Champlain to
Passamaquoddy. In no other wise can one realize how the sterile soil and
the bleak winds and the short summer have been the rugged parents of
that thrift, that industry, that economy, that regard for the small
savings, which have made New England the banker of America. As the
population grew beyond the capacity of the soil, her sons from her
myriad harbors swarmed out upon the sea, an army of occupation, and
annexed the Grand Banks, making them national banks before the days of
Secretary Chase. [Laughter.] When the limits of agriculture were
reached, they enslaved the streams, and clothed the continent. They
gathered hides from Iowa and Texas, and sold them, in the shape of
boots, in Dubuque and Galveston. Sterile New England underlaid the
imperial Northwest with mortgages, and overlaid it with insurance. I
chanced to be in Chicago two or three days after the great fire of 1871.
As I walked among the smoking ruins, if I saw a man with