ss emotion on our side the ocean than on the other, and long ago we
saw the events of the Revolution in a fair perspective. In truth, this
insistence on the past is not wholly creditable to Boston's sense of
humour. The passionate paeans which Otis and his friends sang to Liberty
were irrelevant. Liberty was never for a moment in danger, if Liberty,
indeed, be a thing of fact and not of watchwords. The leaders of the
Revolution wrote and spoke as though it was their duty to throw off the
yoke of the foreigner,--a yoke as heavy as that which Catholic Spain
cast upon Protestant Holland.

But there was no yoke to be thrown off, because no yoke was ever
imposed, and Boston might have celebrated greater events in her history
than that which an American statesman has wisely called "the glittering
and sounding generalities of natural right."

However, if you would forget the follies of politicians, you have but to
cross the bridge and drive to Cambridge, which, like the other Cambridge
of England, is the seat of a distinguished university. You are doubly
rewarded, for not merely is Cambridge a perfect specimen of a colonial
village, but in Harvard there breathes the true spirit of humane
letters. Nor is the college a creation of yesterday. It is not far short
of three centuries ago that John Harvard, once of Emmanuel College
in England, endowed the university which bears his honoured name. The
bequest was a poor L780, with 260 books, but it was sufficient to ensure
an amiable immortality, and to bestow a just cause of pride upon the
mother-college. The daughter is worthy her august parentage. She has
preserved the sentiment of her birth; she still worships the classics
with a constant heart; the fame of her scholars has travelled in the
mouths of men from end to end of Europe. And Harvard has preserved all
the outward tokens of a university. Her wide spaces and lofty avenues
are the fit abode of learning. Her college chapel and her college halls
could serve no other purpose than that for which they are designed. The
West, I believe, has built universities on another plan and to another
purpose. But Harvard, like her great neighbour Boston, has been obedient
to the voice of tradition, and her college, the oldest, remains also the
greatest in America.

Culture has always been at once the boast and the reproach of Boston.
A serious ancestry and the neighbourhood of a university are enough
to ensure a grave devotion to the thing