etiquette as slick as cream, manners sweet as sugar, make society ice cream; and of course it is very tasty, but we can appreciate the apple's full juice of human nature with the fiber of the old stock and the suet of kindness to smooth it all, spice of jest and cider of sentiment, and that makes a Yankee pie of character. And I find that heredity is breaking out in me again; I am talking more pie, so I will stop. PRESIDENT HEPBURN:

"THE DAY OF THE PILGRIMS' SONS"

is the next toast.

Henry Ward Beecher was one of the world's great men, and when he passed away the quest was far and wide to find a competent successor, one who could fill the place and pulpit of the great Beecher.

The quest resolved itself in the fortunate selection of Lyman Abbott. Great and beneficent as has been his pulpit work, Dr. Abbott has all along sought the wider influence that follows the written word, and has impressed his views and personality upon the reading world.

The higher ideals and the better way have been his inspiration, and his long and beautiful life has been devoted, by precept and example, to making men better and making the world better. The crying need of the world to-day is more such men as Lyman Abbott. The Day of the Pilgrims' Sons is his toast-Lyman Abbott.

SPEECH BY DR. LYMAN ABBOTT.

Members of the New England Society, ladies and gentlemen: I desire to turn your thoughts from the past to the future; from the history which has been so concisely and admirably put before us to the duty which devolves upon the descendants of the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims did not all land on Plymouth Rock. Some of them landed on Plymouth Rock, some in New York, some in Pennsylvania, some in Maryland, some in Virginia, and some in the Carolinas. Some were Congregationalists, some were Presbyterians, some were Quakers, some were Roman Catholics, some were Episcopalians, some were Huguenots, but though of varied creeds, varied temperaments, and inheritance, they were so far agreed in their essential faith that in 1787 they united to form upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. This attempt to make a nation self-governing was a wonderful experiment, an audacious experiment, and rested upon a faith in man that was itself audacious. I believe that the experiment has already justified itself; that in the last 125 years more has been accomplished for human rights than in any other 125 years since the world began, and more by America than by any other country on the face of the globe. I am an American and an optimist. I come to you to-night at the end of a nearly spent life. After one has reached the age of threescore years and ten he must expect pretty soon to step off the stage. I want to tell you, as far as I can within the limits of time allotted to me, what we have done in my lifetime, and what we have left you younger men to do in your lifetime.

When I was a boy in half this continent was slavery. The negro did not own himself. He was not a person. He was a thing. We have abolished slavery. When I was a boy it was a fair question, an open question, whether this was a confederacy of independent States

or a nation. We have settled that question. No one any longer regards it as a confederacy of States. We all recognize it as a nation, and as a nation with extended and enlarged functions and powers. Calhoun declared that the State should determine whether a law was constitutional or not; if it was not constitutional in the view of the State, the State need not obey it. A little later some of the Southern States said that if they did not like this confederacy they could withdraw from it. And somewhere in the eighteen hundred and fifties, shortly after the assault on Sumner, I heard a great orator, Wendell Phillips, say in an eloquent speech that Massachusetts should recall their Senators and Representatives and withdraw from the confederacy of the States.

We no longer regard this as a confederacy. It is a nation, a nation with large functions, a nation with large powers, and we have achieved this unifying of the nation, we have achieved this liberation of the slave at the cost of a great civil war, a civil war which in one respect at least was unlike any other civil war that has ever been fought in the history of the world, I think. At the end of it not a single life was taken, and, if I mistake not, not a single acre of land was confiscated as a penalty upon those that were in revolt. The only lives that were taken were the lives of some who were guilty of assassination after the war was over. Search the pages of history to find another case where men have been arrayed in arms against each other, where a great revolt has arisen against a great and beneficent government, and at the end the parties have shaken hands and established a freer and greater friendship than they had before. For when I was a boy the North looked on the South with contempt. They said, the South will not fight; and the South looked on the North with contempt: they said the North will not fight. Horrible as the war is it brings some advantages. After the boys in gray and the boys in blue had fought each other for four years, they found that they would fight,

and then each side respected the other side, and we have a nation founded on mutual respect and confidence, the only nation that could stand the test of time.

Not only that-the war over, the North sent a new army of teachers, contributions of money (counted first by hundreds, then by thousands, now by millions) to help the South lay the foundations of a new civilization in a broad system of education. Not only that-the South set an example which I also think is unparalleled in the history of the world. The conquered country set herself to work under the leadership of her greatest and noblest man, Gen. Robert E. Lee, to establish in the South the very civilization against which they had been fighting for those four years.

Since then, we have fought in our time the most altruistic fight that has ever been fought in the history of the world. I know still there is some question in the minds of men respecting the Spanish-American War, and I am not going to discuss the general aspect of it. Enough to ask you to look at the picture of the American war compared with the picture of the war going on to-day on the other side of the ocean, and note this: We took Cuba from Spain and gave it to the Cubans; we took Porto Rico from Spain and turned over to the Porto Ricans all the taxes we received from the people, every dollar of it; we took the Philippines from Spain, and we sent an army of teachers, and turned our soldiers into teachers that we might lay in that country the foundations of a free, self-governing community. We asked no war indemnity from the conquered country; instead we paid ourselves to Spain in hard cash the money she had expended in putting in the public improvements in the country we had conquered from her. Again I say, search the pages of history and parallel it if you can in the history of mankind.

When I was a boy the public school system was confined to one half the nation. There was no public school in any proper sense of the term south of the Mason and

Dixon line. In my own lifetime the public school system has been extended from the Golden Gate to Sandy Hook and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico-no State without its public school system. Not only that, it has been extended so that the school doors are open to every child, white, black, red or yellow, negro, Indian, Chinaman, Japanese call him what you like. Not only that-not only the public school system has been extended in a geographical sense and been extended in its opening doors, but education has been opened to the women who in my boyhood had no advantages for the higher education. I think it was in 1820 or 1830 that the school board of Boston (the Athens of America) passed a resolution that the girls might use the high school building when the boys were not using it. To-day the higher education is furnished for women; colleges have been founded, and they have practically the same advantages as their brothers-all done in my lifetime. My father in 1833 (two years before I was born) was one of the founders of the first schools for the broader education of women. Not only that, when I was a college boy there were only three learned professions-law, medicine and the ministry. Nobody else was supposed to wish to be learned. I am a graduate of the New York University. When I graduated from it the entire undergraduate department did not amount to 200 students. The undergraduate department of that university now numbers 4,000 students. And that is a type of what has been going on all over the country in the development of the higher education and in the development of the broader education. Merchants, farmers, engineers, manufacturers-all taking on the higher, broader, better education. I count it a special honor to be invited to stand here on this platform by the side of the man who has done perhaps more than any other man in America -certainly as much as any other man in America-in the leadership of this great, broad, rich and splendid education for the American people.