VII.

THE NEW ENGLAND HOME.

HE CHARACTER of the New-Englander, perhaps more than that of any other maan, is the

result of his home. It is not national so much as it is domestic. The virtues which make him stand out among men are not the acquirements of schools and colleges, of travel and society, the transmission of caste, the result of institutions, but virtues brought with him in all their power from the home, and set to work upon the world. He is not a conformer to things as he finds them, but sets himself to make them conform to him. Most tenacious is he of his identity, and, while others lose themselves in their surroundings, he is a Yankee to the end. No clime, no polish, no position, takes that out of him. It is told of a dervish, that by certain signs in the sand he not only decided that a camel had passed that way, but that he was lame and blind and had lost a tooth. And so by signs as unmistakable, sometimes as unnoticed by the careless, you may detect the presence, the influence

of the New-Englander, though you may not see the man. I remember, some years ago, after passing through the State of Virginia, and becoming familiar with the peculiarities of plantation buildings and plantation life, that when I entered Fairfax County I felt as if I had been suddenly taken back to the quiet farms of my own State. The substantial barns, the well-ordered outbuildings, the familiar implements, the green blinds, and a certain unmistakable air of New England thrift, surprised me, so sudden and so great was the contrast with the exhausted fields, the shabby negro-quarters, the shiftless aspect of all I had lately seen. "This looks like New England!” I exclaimed, and was told that certain Yankee farmers, some years previous, had taken up a tract of exhausted land, and had made it what I saw,- had planted New England there. So it is wherever he goes. The New-Englander is slow to assimilate with other people. He takes his notions, his prejudices, his character, his home, with him. In strange cities I have never failed to detect New-Englanders. There is a something about the individual men and women, but there is more about their homes, which you cannot mistake. Cosmopolite as he is, be it under the tropics, by the western sea, or in the eastern clime, under all his outward conformity, you find him still clinging to the habit and the faith of home.

there may be

Whatever of original, peculiar power in the New England character, its availability is owing mainly to the training of home. I am confident that whatever of good in morals, laws, religion, in enterprise, in literature and art, may be justly attributable to New England influence, may be as justly traced to the New England home. It is the home that has made the man. And wherever he is, on the Arctic sea or in the California mine, it is the memory of home that governs him. His Anglo-Saxon blood would have availed him little, but for his AngloSaxon home. It is with man as with the horse, the blood is little without the training; and when we feel inclined to brag a little, — a a thing New-Englanders have a little inclination to, or when we trace in the history and progress of this young world the influences of New England, let us remember, that but for her simple and humble homes none of these things could be. These have made our people. We and others are apt to attribute a certain indisputable preëminence in our citizens to our common schools; and so far as mental training goes, this is true; but we must not forget that it is the moral characteristics of the New-Englander, more than the mental, which have marked him out as separate and peculiar, these which have exerted so wide an influence at home and abroad, and these are the products of our homes.

I

I shall never forget a remark once made to me by a gentleman of Northern New York. "I take it for granted," said he, "that a New-Yorker is dishonest until I can prove him honest, but that a Massachusetts man is honest until I can prove him dishonest." should not have liked to make the remark myself, nor should I be willing to subscribe to it in full; but as, coming from one not of New England, it was worthy of remembrance. I believe there is a reputation of this sort abroad, -that in financial, as in other matters, our own name stands in the advance; and again I say that I believe this is mainly because of our homes, because of what we were taught, and what we saw of stern and sterling integrity in the far-back days of childhood. And if we are to keep that proud place in coming generations, if we are to furnish our sons with that capital, better than gold, which has been the element of success with us, we must come back to a truer love for, and a more watchful care over, home; we must not suffer these more exciting and brilliant outside things to usurp the power and privilege which is of right its alone, but with a something of the old Puritan spirit, if need be, insist upon those virtues, and those restrictions, in which we can now see lie the foundations of character and usefulness. We are letting the world master the home. The sceptre is passing away from the hearth-stone.

By our altars and our fires we ought to make our stand, and over the ashes of the past contend for the security of the future. With us who are in the dust and heat of the present is the twofold duty of keeping to the standard transmitted us, and transmitting it as we have received it. It is the legacy of our fathers, of which we are the stewards. It is that by which they have won their proud place in history. While crowns have crumbled and nations wasted and great reputations perished, brighter and brighter has grown the halo that encircles the memories of those who planted and gave the distinctive character to the New England home. That is all they had to give, that is all we have to bequeathe. Stern and bleak are New England hills and New England shores. Contrasted with the fatness of the plantation and the prairie, her soil may seem sterile and her harvests meagre. Granite and ice may be the only raw material we have to offset the more tempting produce of kindlier climes ; but I say it in no boasting mood - I know no spot upon which the sun shines which has such capacity for raising men. Here cluster, centre, and combine all that can be asked for the best advantage of the race,—a climate that invigorates the body, a soil that demands and remunerates labor, rivers for our manufactures, the ocean for traffic and for sustenance, laws, churches, colleges, schools, and behind them all,