“Do not misunderstand me. I would throw no slurs on Western men. There are thousands in New England as all-absorbed in money-getting as they, only there is this saving difference: Here, these men are, in spite of themselves, under the influence of traditions and institutions founded by better men than they; and there, they are the creators of the traditions and institutions which are to be and which will of a surety be no better than they choose to make them.
“It is the early settlers that shape the future of the country. Massachusetts, New Jersey, South Carolina are to-day what their first settlers made them.
“I believe in the New England principles, and in the men who sought New England’s shores, not to find gold, to speculate in land, to buy bonanza farms, but to found a commonwealth such as mankind had never seen, a commonwealth whose corner-stones should be righteousness and ideas.
“It is these New England principles that I would engraft upon that great empire of the West, which to-day is so plastic in our hands, whose future we, to-day, have power to shape, but which to-morrow we shall be powerless to mould.
“I would teach them that all their limitless material resources cannot make them the real power in the land that little, sterile Massachusetts, with her east winds and rocky soils, has been, unless they first plant the seed that shall bring forth such men of character and thought as New England has borne.
“Why was it that so many of the men of this century, whom the nation most delights to honor, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, Beecher, Curtis, Garrison, Phillips, Webster, were sons of this New England soil?
“I know that I am saying nothing new. All this is very trite, as trite as the Ten Commandments. It has been said a thousand times; yet half our people do not know it or believe it, and serenely smile at what they call our ‘Eastern egotism.’ I confess that we have quite too much of that. I, for one, have almost as hearty a contempt as any of them for the men who
... ‘sit the idle slaves of a legendary virtue
Carved upon their fathers’ graves.’
“Let no one think that I am boasting of the New England of to-day. I am simply saying that the principles which have made her a power in this nation are the principles by which, in East and West, in North and South, this nation must rise, or without which she must fall. And if the nation is to be saved,