vous
palpitations of rhetoric.

The freedom with which each of us speaks his thought in this presence,
belongs in part to the assured position of the Profession in our
Commonwealth, to the attitude of Science, which is always fearless, and
to the genius of the soil on which we stand, from which Nature withheld
the fatal gift of malaria only to fill it with exhalations that breed
the fever of inquiry in our blood and in our brain. But mainly we owe
the large license of speech we enjoy to those influences and privileges
common to us all as self-governing Americans.

This Republic is the chosen home of minorities, of the less power in
the presence of the greater. It is a common error to speak of our
distinction as consisting in the rule of the majority. Majorities, the
greater material powers, have always ruled before. The history of most
countries has been that of majorities, mounted majorities, clad in iron,
armed with death treading down the tenfold more numerous minorities. In
the old civilizations they root themselves like oaks in the soil; men
must live in their shadow or cut them down. With us the majority is only
the flower of the passing noon, and the minority is the bud which may
open in the next morning's sun. We must be tolerant, for the thought
which stammers on a single tongue today may organize itself in the
growing consciousness of the time, and come back to us like the voice of
the multitudinous waves of the ocean on the morrow.

Twenty-five years have passed since one of your honored Presidents spoke
to this Society of certain limitations to the power of our Art, now very
generally conceded. Some were troubled, some were almost angry, thinking
the Profession might suffer from such concessions. It has certainly not
suffered here; if, as some affirm, it has lost respect anywhere, it was
probably for other, and no doubt sufficient reasons.

Since that time the civilization of this planet has changed hands.
Strike out of existence at this moment every person who was breathing on
that day, May 27, 1835, and every institution of society, every art and
every science would remain intact and complete in the living that would
be left. Every idea the world then held has been since dissolved and
recrystallized.

We are repeating the same process. Not to make silver shrines for our
old divinities, even though by this craft we should have our wealth, was
this Society organized and carried on by the good men and tr