charge of the
Department over which I preside was an extremely well-written one from a
western State, asking for a Consulate, and beginning in this wise: "I
have no excuse for intruding on your busy occupations except a
pardonable desire to live elsewhere." [Laughter.] Now that has been the
mainspring of New Englanders ever since they were seated by Providence
on its barren shores, a pardonable desire to live elsewhere. [Laughter.]
If they had been planted here--if they had been seated in the luxurious
climate and with the fertile soil of the South, they would have had no
desire, pardonable or otherwise, to live elsewhere. Though they might
have grown and lived they never would have proved the seed that was to
make the Great Republic as it now is. [Applause.]

There has been an idea that some part of the active, spreading and
increasing influence of the New England people as they moved about the
world, was from a meddlesome disposition to interfere with other people.
There is nothing in that. If there ever was a race that confined itself
strictly to minding its own business, it is the New Englanders; and they
mind it, with great results. The solution of this apparent discord is
simply this: that a New Englander considers everybody else's business
his business. [Loud laughter.] Now these two essential notions of
wishing to live elsewhere, and regarding everybody else's business as
our business, furnish the explanation of the processes by which this
Republic has come to be what it is--great in every form of power, of
strength, of wealth. This dissemination of New England men, and this
permeation through other people's business--of our control of it--have
made the nation what it is. [Applause.]

The statesmanship of the New England character, was the greatest
statesmanship of the world. It did not undertake to govern by authority,
or by power, but by those ideas and methods which were common to human
nature, and were to make a people great, and able to govern themselves.
[Applause.] The great elements of that State thus developed, were
education, industry and commerce. Education which, as Aristotle says,
"makes one do by choice what others do by force;" industry, which by
occupying and satisfying all the avidities of our nature, leaves to
government only the simple duty of curbing the vicious and punishing the
wicked. Commerce, that, by unfolding to the world the relations of
people with people, makes a system of foreign