me to say something about this Society and the people of New
England and the pilgrims who first landed on Plymouth Rock. It was my
fortune last night to attend a banquet of this sort in the principal
city on New York harbor. [Applause and laughter.] I did not know until I
went there [Brooklyn] that it was the principal city [laughter]--the
principal city of the harbor of New York, a city whose overflow has
settled up Manhattan Island, which has built up fine houses, business
streets, and shown many evidences of prosperity for a suburb, with a
waste of people flowing across the North River that forms a third if not
one-half the population of a neighboring state. [Applause.] As I say, it
was my good fortune to attend a banquet of this sort of the parent
society [laughter], and to which all the societies known, even including
the one which is now celebrating its first anniversary in Las Vegas, New
Mexico, owe their origin. [Laughter.] I made a few remarks there, in
which I tried to say what I thought were the characteristics of the
people who have descended from the Pilgrims. I thought they were a
people of great frugality, great personal courage, great industry, and
possessed within themselves of qualities which built up this New England
population which has spread out over so much of this land and given so
much character, prosperity, and success to us as a people and a nation.
[Applause.] I retain yet some of the views I then expressed [peals of
laughter], and should have remained convinced that my judgment was
entirely right if it were not that some speakers came after me who have
a better title to speak for the people of New England than myself, and
who dispelled some of those views. [Renewed laughter.]

It is too many generations back for me to claim to be a New Englander.
Those gentlemen who spoke are themselves New Englanders who have, since
their manhood, emigrated to this great city that I speak of. They
informed me that there was nothing at all in the Pilgrim fathers to give
them the distinguishing characteristics which we attribute to them
[laughter], and that it was all entirely dependent upon the poverty of
the soil and the inclemency of the climate where they landed. [Shouts of
laughter.] They fell upon an ungenial climate, where there were nine
months of winter and three months of cold weather [laughter], and that
had called out the best energies of the men and of the women, too, to
get a mere subsistence out