friends by the charm of his genial
nature.

Gen. George S. Greene, the oldest living graduate of the West Point
Military Academy, who rendered valiant and distinguished service on many
battle-fields of the Civil War, who was the faithful and efficient head
of the Croton Aqueduct Board for many years; was represented in the
military service of his country by several distinguished sons and, until
his death, in his ninety-eighth year, retained all his faculties
undimmed--a soldier and a citizen of whom his country was justly proud.
[Applause.]

Roswell P. Flower, an honored Governor of this State, eminent as a
philanthropist and financier, a leader among strong men.

William H. Webb, a pioneer shipbuilder, with a name famous wherever
American commerce extended, a rugged, iron man who stood four square to
all the winds of heaven, generous and tender-hearted as a child, who for
forty-five years never failed in his attendance at the dinners of this
Society, and who left a reputation for philanthropy and public spirit
unsurpassed in this city of generous giving.

John G. Moore, John Brooks, Edward H. R. Lyman, Edward A. Quintard, Dr.
Charles Inslee Pardee, and all the others to whom the limit of time will
not allow a tribute worthy of their honorable lives and work.

We do well to recall upon such occasions as this, as an inspiration, the
story of the emigration of our Pilgrim ancestors to America, involving,
as it does, the whole modern development, diffusion and organization of
English liberty, which lives and breathes and burns in legend and in
song. It is unparalleled in the annals of the world, in the majesty of
its purpose and the poverty of its means, the weakness of the beginning
and the grandeur of the result. It is unparalleled in classic or modern
history, in its exhibition of courage, patience, persistence,
steadfastness in devotion to principle. Beginning with the hasty flight
from Lincolnshire to Holland, the peaceful life in exile, the perilous
ocean voyage in a crazy craft in mid-winter, the frail settlement at
Plymouth--a shred of the most tenacious life in Europe--floating over
the waste of waters and clinging on the bleakest edge of America, beset
by Indians, wild beasts and disease, starving, frozen and dying, remote
from succor and beyond the knowledge of their kin, like a seed from the
Old World floated to the New by ocean currents, containing the elements
which, like the mustard seed, should yield a