s subject of
Forefathers' Day, like a Rugby ball, into my hands--after making elegant
play with it himself--and, frightful as the responsibility is, I realize
that I've got to do something with it--and do it mighty quick.
[Laughter.] This is a festive hour, and even a preacher mustn't be any
more edifying in his remarks, I suppose, than he can help. And I promise
accordingly to use my conscientious endeavors to-night to leave this
worshipful company no better than I found it. [Laughter.]

But, gentlemen, well intending as one may be to that effect, and lightly
as he may approach the theme of the Forefathers, the minute he sets foot
within its threshold he stops his fooling and gets his hat off at once.
[Applause.]

Those unconscious, pathetic heroes, pulling their shallop ashore on the
Cape yonder in 1620--what reverence can exceed their just merit! What
praise can compass the virtue of that sublime, unconquerable manhood, by
which in the calamitous, woful days that followed, not accepting
deliverance, letting the Mayflower go back empty, they stayed perishing
by the graves of their fallen; rather, stayed fast by the flickering
flame of their living truth, and so invoked and got on their side
forever the force of that great law of the universe, "except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit." How richly and how speedily fruitful that
seed was, we know. It did not wait for any large unfolding of events on
these shores to prove the might of its quickening. "Westward the star of
empire takes its way." Yes, but the first pulse of vital power from the
new State moved eastward. For behold it still in its young infancy--if
it can be said to have had an infancy--stretching a strong hand of help
across the sea to reinforce the cause of that Commonwealth, the rise of
which marks the epoch of England's new birth in liberty. [Applause.]

The pen of New England, fertilized by freedom and marvellously prolific
ere a single generation passed, was indeed the Commonwealth's true
nursing mother. Cromwell, Hampden, Sidney, Milton, Owen, were disciples
of teachers mostly from this side the Atlantic. Professor Masson, of
Edinburgh University, in his admirable "Life of Milton," enumerates
seventeen New England men whom he describes as "potent" in England in
that period. Numbers went to England in person, twelve of the first
twenty graduates of Harvard College prior to 164