“In this picturesque, beautiful and impressive Celebration, the Bi-Centennial of the settlement of this region, thought is naturally turned to the village of New Milford and the community life gradually developed here. There were certain fundamental characteristics of this village life which you, who were a part of it in later days, appreciate much better than your speaker. And yet even a superficial knowledge of what was here begun and has been gradually developed impresses these fundamental characteristics.

“This was a simple and natural life. The speaker preceding me has developed eloquently this fact. Artificiality had not yet crept into the social conditions of this life. The value of a man was not estimated by his heredity nor his wealth. It was a pure, clean democracy where every man was a man in privilege and opportunity ‘for a’ that, and a’ that.’

“But another element of this village life was also evident from the first. This was the articulation of the community. Everyone knew every other one within the confines of the settlement, although stretching along the edges of the beautiful rivers, down the valleys and plains, and up the slope of the stately old mountains. When Mary Jones’ husband died and left her with a brood of little children, every man and woman in the community knew it, and most of them called upon Mary Jones with their burden of food or clothing or wood-shed supplies. It was the articulation of one life into another life, and of each life into the whole, that made the village of New Milford and every village in New England so strong and safe and efficient.

“But, little by little, these villagers in New Milford and other communities round about felt the need of the articulation of community interest into a larger whole. And so the community of associated responsibility and help took in Waterbury, Norwalk, Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven and other villages and towns scattered over this general region. This articulated the separate communities into a larger whole and the commonwealth was created. It was not a formal government so much as a community of interest and sympathy and love and organized efficiency. These several communities became a commonwealth for protection and development. Self-control was the basis of governmental control. The village was strong and vigorous in so far as the individual man and woman were strong and vigorous. The commonwealth developed these qualities of influence and strength only as the village developed them. And so this simple, this articulate life of the village became the life of the commonwealth.

“Then a new condition arose. King George came across the water, established his forts, anchored his fleet in the harbor of another community that began as a village in the neighboring colony of Massachusetts. There was need of protection and safeguard in a larger way than the group of communities or villages furnished. So there came the articulation of the commonwealth with that of other commonwealths, and the united colonial power came into being. This afterwards became, as we all know so well, the United States.

“So, in constructive analysis, beginning with the unit of governmental power and influence, we find the village. No fairer or better or cleaner or more dignified than this village of New Milford existed in all the group of villages amid all the clustered commonwealths. A son of some Pilgrims from New Milford, who drifted into northern Ohio, who is your speaker at this moment, rejoices with you who have dwelt here in the East, in this magnificent and imposing Celebration of the founding of New Milford.

“But a larger view than this must be taken if we would estimate the importance and meaning of this village Celebration. The articulation of interests in the life of our nation as it exists to-day is much more difficult than it was when these villages grew by natural processes into the early national life. Multitudinous and heterogeneous masses are mingled in our body politic to-day, coming from nations that know nothing about the traditions of Puritan, or Pilgrim, or Dutch, or Cavalier. In many of these nations from which these peoples come and mingle in our life, the only thought of government is that of power, of police force, or suppression. Danger threatens us as we attempt to assimilate into our own national life these heterogeneous masses. It is not that they are bad, but that they come to us with no such conceptions of the simplicity and articulation of life and government as our fathers possessed who established the villages of New England. Our responsibility is to spread everywhere the great principles that lay at the foundations of village life in early New England. It is not from northern Europe that immigrants come who are a menace to these institutions that have made the United States what they are to-day. The real problem is the assimilation of unassociated races who are making a large portion of our body politic. Twenty million of the eighty million who are citizens of the United States are of the brown-skinned, undeveloped races. They represent fundamentally different ideals from those that made New England and the southern colonial States the power they were. It is for us in this generation to stimulate in these brown-skinned people the higher conceptions and loftier ideals represented in these villages that furnished the unit of development in the early years of the nation. There are two United States to-day, and we cannot neglect either of them with safety. There is Continental United States, the familiar old stretch of territory from ocean to ocean and from gulf to northern Alaska. This furnishes problems enough for the children of the Pilgrims to meet and solve. But another United States has been added in these later years, and that is Insular United States. They were brought to us through the arbitrament of war. We did not seek them; we perhaps are the poorer for their possession. But the great problem that God in His providence has put upon us to-day is the elevation and redemption of the masses of these island peoples. They have no village traditions or life to look back to. They have no intelligent conception of freedom. Morality is almost an unknown quality as we use the term. One great problem before Americans to-day, therefore, is the Americanizing and Christianizing of these masses that have become a part of our body politic, and whose future will largely determine the future of our entire nation.

“The village ideal, the simple, natural life that the smaller communities illustrated, the articulation of interests into one common and homogeneous whole, is what is demanded to-day, and what we must struggle for and achieve if the nation remains in its integrity and strength and dignity.

“When we analyze back to the village, we only go a part of the way. The unit after all was the home. One home articulated with other homes was the final analysis of strength and safety. It is the home, and not the church or the school, that holds men and women to that which is best and noblest. It was the home in the villages of New England, it was the home in New Milford, that determined its value and contributed to its beauty of community life. We have got to create in these masses that are coming among us the desire for the best, purest, noblest Christian home, or our entire civilization is in danger. If this Bi-Centennial of New Milford shall stir the hearts of the descendants of the brave men and women who established this village with a great passionate desire and an overmastering determination to perpetuate these great ideals and visions which the fathers held and nourished in their homes and united in their community life, then this Bi-Centennial were indeed an occasion of deepest rejoicing and abiding value.”

SUNDAY EVENING