he very
brightest squib that I read in the late election campaign--and as the
President says, gentlemen, I am going to respect the proprieties of the
occasion. It was sent to one of the journals from the Western Reserve;
and the writer, who, if I have rightly guessed his name, is one of the
most brilliant of our younger poets, was descanting on the Chinook
vocabulary, in which a Chinook calls an Englishman a Chinchog to this
day, in memory of King George. And this writer says that when they have
a young chief whose war-paint is very perfect, whose blanket is
thoroughly embroidered, whose leggins are tied up with exactly the right
colors, and who has the right kind of star upon his forehead and cheeks,
but who never took a scalp, never fired an arrow, and never smelled
powder, but was always found at home in the lodges whenever there was
anything that scented of war--he says the Chinooks called that man by
the name of "Boston Cultus." [Applause and laughter.] Well, now,
gentlemen, what are you laughing at? Why do you laugh? Some of you had
Boston fathers, and more of you had Boston mothers. Why do you laugh?
Ah! you have seen these people, as I have seen them, as everybody has
seen them--people who sat in Parker's and discussed every movement of
the campaign in the late war, and told us that it was all wrong, that we
were going to the bad, but who never shouldered a musket. They are
people who tell us that the emigration, that the Pope of Rome, or the
German element, or the Irish element, is going to play the dogs with our
social system, and yet they never met an emigrant on the wharf or had a
word of comfort to say to a foreigner. We have those people in Boston.
You may not have them in New York, and I am very glad if you have not;
but if you are so fortunate, it is the only place on God's earth where I
have not found such people. [Laughter and applause.] But there is
another kind of culture which began even before there was any
Boston--for there was such a day as that. [Laughter.] There were ten
years in the history of this worlds ten long years, too, before Boston
existed, and those are the years between Plymouth Rock and the day when
some unfortunate men, not able to get to Plymouth Rock, stopped and
founded that city. [Laughter.] This earlier culture is a culture not of
the schoolhouse, or of the tract, but a culture as well of the church,
of history, of the town-meeting, as John Adams says; that nobler culture
to wh