Whatever of original, peculiar power there may be 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 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 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." I 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,

greater than all, homes. They will not rank outwardly with baronial castles, or ancestral halls, or, it may be, with the courtlier homes of the "Old Dominion." Engraved upon the page of history, the world would pass them by for those of sounding name or mediæval architecture, but under the low roof, within the farmer's kitchen, beneath the drooping elm, have been born and cultured men, who, take it for all in all, are the marked men of the past two centuries.

It is the privilege, as well as the duty, of every man to speak well of the country and the place in which he was born, provided he do no injustice to any other. He is traitor to some of the finest and holiest instincts of humanity if he do not. I do not deny to any their distinctive virtues and attainments, but the occasion only demands that I should speak of New England, and point out some peculiarities in her past homes, which cannot be spared from the present, if our future is to exert the influence for good broadly ascribed to our past.

Of these characteristics I shall place first religion, because it is essential to the idea of a true New England home, fundamental to a true New England character. It is not a little curious that in all the Colonies there was some distinct, separate religious tendency, if not faith, even in those with whose organization religion had nothing to do. Pennsylvania, Virginia,

Maryland, Georgia, are largely impregnated with the peculiar religious views of the primitive settlers, and individuals and homes are largely influenced by them. It was not merely that our fathers fled hither for conscience' sake, and made religion as the corner-stone of their new polity, but it was the kind of religion they professed, and the kind of character which grew from it, that have made us the peculiar people that we are. The Puritan faith, grafted on the Anglo-Saxon stock, has resulted in a man unlike any existing type,

a man to be known to the ages as introducing a new moral and intellectual order. Leave out either element, or place them under other circumstances, and the product were quite another thing. There was much that was gloomy and austere, much that was narrow and bigoted, much that was untrue or perverted, in the Puritan faith, but there was also much of what the human spirit always needs most, a downright, indomitable religious trust, a sincere, though sometimes mistaken, service of God, a service by no means wanting in gratitude, if never breaking into exuberant joy, a faith to which we do gross injustice when we regard it as only stern and forbidding.

When I see what substantial and enduring good has come to our homes because of the rigor of faith and discipline among our ancestors, I am more and