President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University gave an historical address. In graphic language he contrasted the desolate prospect confronting the Pilgrims at Cape Cod with the picture upon which the present concourse gazed, a happy and prosperous population filling the smiling land and in the harbour traversed by the Mayflower a varied throng of ships, "with them numerous representatives of a strong naval force maintained by the eighty million free people who in nine generations from the Pilgrims have explored, subdued, and occupied that mysterious wilderness so formidable to the imagination of the early European settlers on the Atlantic coast of the American continent."
With force and pathos Dr. Eliot spoke of the debt they all owed to the Pilgrim Fathers. "We are to hear the voices of the Chief Magistrate of this multitudinous people and of the Governor of the Commonwealth acknowledging the immeasurable indebtedness of the United States and of the Colony, Province, and State of Massachusetts to the adult men and the eighteen adult women who were the substance or seed-bearing core of the Pilgrim company; and we, the thousands brought hither peacefully in a few summer hours by vehicles and forces unimagined in 1620 from the wide circuit of Cape Cod—which it took the armed parties from the Mayflower a full month to explore in the wintry weather they encountered—salute tenderly and reverently the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, and, recalling their fewness and their sufferings, anxieties and labours, felicitate them and ourselves on the wonderful issues in human Joy, strength, and freedom of their faith, endurance, and dauntless resolution."
Dr. Eliot was followed by M. Van Weede, chargé d'affaires of the Netherlands Legation at Washington, whose Government was represented on this occasion because the Pilgrims sailed from Holland. (The cornerstone laying three years before was attended by the British Ambassador.)
Formal transfer of the Monument from the National Commission, which directed its construction, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Pilgrim Memorial Association, was made on behalf of the United States Government by Senator Lodge, who enlarged upon the two great political principles embodied in the Mayflower compact, the conception of an organic law and of a representative democracy, and on the noble purpose—that of securing freedom of worship and the preservation of their nationality and native language—of the little band of exiles who signed the document and settled there.
William B. Lawrence of Medford accepted the Monument on behalf of the Memorial Association, and a quartet sang "The Landing of the Pilgrims," by Mrs. Felicia Hemans.
Congressman James T. McCleary of Minnesota, who supported the bill in Congress for a Government appropriation to assist in the building of the Monument, also spoke.
Photograph by A. S. Burbank, Plymouth
Plymouth Rock