ave
descended from them and come so far away.

Now, there are serious aspects to this subject. I believe that one of
the responsibilities of having ancestors is the necessity of not being
ashamed of them. I believe if you have had persons of this sort as your
forefathers you must really try to represent them in some sort of way.
And you must set yourselves off against the other elements of population
in this country. You know that we have received very many elements which
have nothing of the Puritan about them, which have nothing of New
England about them; and that the chief characteristic of these people is
that they have broken all their traditions. The reason that most
foreigners come to this country is in order to break their traditions,
to drop them. They come to this country because these traditions bind
them to an order of society which they will no longer endure, and they
come to be quit of them. You yourselves will bear me witness that these
men, some of them, stood us in good stead upon a very recent occasion:
in last November. [Applause. "Hear! Hear!"] We should not at all
minimize the vote of the foreign-born population as against the vote of
some of the native-born population on the question of silver and gold.
But you will observe that there are some things that it would be
supposed would belong to any tradition. One would suppose it would
belong to any tradition that it was better to earn a dollar that did not
depreciate, and these men have simply shown that there are some
common-sense elements which are international and not national.

One of the particulars in which we are drawn away from our traditions is
in respect to the make-up and government of society, and it is in that
respect we should retrace our steps and preserve our traditions; because
we are suffering ourselves to drift away from the old standards, and we
say, with a shrug of the shoulders, that we are not responsible for it;
that we have not changed the age, though the age has changed us. We feel
very much as the Scotchman did who entered the fish market. His dog,
being inquisitive, investigated a basket of lobsters, and while he was
nosing about incautiously one of the lobsters got hold of his tail,
whereupon he went down the street with the lobster as a pendant. Says
the man, "Whustle to your dog, mon." "Nay, nay, mon," quoth the
Scotchman, "You whustle for your lobster." We are very much in the same
position with reference to the age;