THE PILGRIM MOTHERS
Reprinted with the author's permission
BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE
I really don't know, at this late hour, Mr. Chairman, how you expect me to treat this difficult and tender subject.
I might take up the subject etymologically, and try and explain how woman ever acquired that remarkable name. But that has been done before me by a poet with whose stanzas you are not familiar, but whom you will recognize as deeply versed in this subject, for he says:—
"When Eve brought woe to all mankind,
Old Adam called her woe-man,
But when she woo'd with love so kind,
He then pronounced her woman.
"But now, with folly and with pride,
Their husbands' pockets trimming,
The ladies are so full of whims
That people call them w(h)imen."
Mr. Chairman, I believe you said I should say something about the Pilgrim mothers. Well, sir, it is rather late in the evening to venture upon that historic subject. But, for one, I pity them. The occupants of the galleries will bear me witness that even these modern Pilgrims— these Pilgrims with all the modern improvements—how hard it is to put up with their weaknesses, their follies, their tyrannies, their oppressions, their desire of dominion and rule. But when you go back to the stern horrors of the Pilgrim rule, when you contemplate the rugged character of the Pilgrim fathers, why, you give credence to what a witty woman of Boston said—she had heard enough of the glories and sufferings of the Pilgrim fathers; for her part, she had a world of sympathy for the Pilgrim mothers, because they not only endured all that the Pilgrim fathers had done, but they also had to endure the Pilgrim fathers to boot. Well, sir, they were afraid of woman. They thought she was almost too refined a luxury for them to indulge in. Miles Standish spoke for them all, and I am sure that General Sherman, who so much resembles Miles Standish, not only in his military renown but in his rugged exterior and in his warm and tender heart, will echo his words when he says:—
"I can march up to a fortress, and summon the place to surrender, But march up to a woman with such a proposal, I dare not. I am not afraid of bullets, nor shot from the mouth of a cannon, But of a thundering 'No!' point-blank from the mouth of a woman, That I confess I'm afraid of, nor am I ashamed to confess it."
Mr. President, did you ever see a more self-satisfied or contented set of men than these that are gathered at these tables this evening? I never come to the Pilgrim dinner and see these men, who have achieved in the various departments of life such definite and satisfactory success, but that I look back twenty or thirty or forty years, and see the lantern-jawed boy who started out from the banks of the Connecticut, or some more remote river of New England, with five dollars in his pocket and his father's blessing on his head and his mother's Bible in his carpetbag, to seek those fortunes which now they have so gloriously made. And there is one woman whom each of these, through all his progress and to the last expiring hour of his life, bears in tender remembrance. It is the mother who sent him forth with her blessing. A mother is a mother still—the holiest thing alive; and if I could dismiss you with a benediction to-night, it would be by invoking upon the heads of you all the blessing of the mothers that we left behind us.