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GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR

(1826-)

NDER the act inviting the States to present memorial statues for the Hall of the House of Representatives at Washington, Massachusetts presented those of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams as her two most representative men. The oration delivered by Senator Hoar in making the presentation was a model of literary finish, not surpassed in this respect even by Everett's best. Senator Hoar was born at Concord, Massachusetts, August 29th, 1826. He entered national politics as a Republican Member of Congress from Massachusetts in 1869, serving in the Lower House until 1876, when he was elected to the Senate. He was a member of the Electoral Commission of 1877, and during his service in the Senate, which has been continuous since that date, he has been identified in one way or other with nearly all the most important legislation of that body. He is a man of strong individuality at once developed and restrained by a thorough education. Since the death of Charles Sumner he is, without doubt, the most efficient public speaker New England has sent to the Senate.

THE GREAT MEN OF MASSACHUSETTS

(From an Oration Delivered December 19th, 1876, on the Presentation of the Statues of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams to the United States)

Mr. Speaker:

THE

HE Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in obedience to the invitation of Congress, presents to the United States the statues of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams, to be placed in the old Hall of the House of Representatives, and to be kept reverently in that beautiful and stately chamber so long as its columns shall endure.

Different kinds of public service, various manifestations of intellectual and moral greatness, have been held by different nations and ages to constitute the chief title to their regard. With all her wealth in other departments of glory, England chiefly values the men who have done good fighting in her great wars.

Marlborough and Nelson and Wellington crown the stateliest columns in the squares and streets of her chief cities. When we would picture to ourselves the republics of Italy, four laureled heads of famous poets stand out upon the canvas. The statue of Erasmus, the great scholar of Holland, with a book in his hand, looks down upon the busy market place of Rotterdam. The judgment of mankind has probably determined that through the great jurists of the days of the empire, Rome has made her deepest impression on the world. The names of great soldiers, founders of nations, jurists, ministers of state, men of science, inventors, historians, poets, orators, philanthropists, reformers, teachers, are found in turn on the columns by which the gratitude of nations seeks to give immortality to their benefactors.

In deciding which of these classes should be represented or who of her children in each is worthiest of this honor, Massachusetts has not been driven to choose of her poverty. Is the choice to fall upon a soldier? Sturdy Miles Standish, earliest of the famous captains of America—“in small room large heart inclosed" - Sir William Pepperell, the conqueror of Louisburg, may vie with each other for the glory of standing by the everyouthful and majestic figure of Warren.

Would the reverence of the nation commemorate its founders? To the State made up of the blended colonies founded by Endicott and Winthrop and the men who, on board the Mayflower, signed the first written constitution that ever existed among men, more than one-third of the people of the United States to-day trace their lineage.

No American state, no civilized nation, has contributed more illustrious names to jurisprudence than Parsons and Mason and Story and Shaw.

The long roll of her statesmen begins with those who laid the foundation of the little colony deep and strong enough for an empire. It will end when the love of liberty dies out from the soul of man. Bradford and Carver; Endicott and Winthrop; Vane, the friend of Milton and counselor of Cromwell; Otis and Samuel Adams and Quincy and Hawley, the men who conducted on the side of the people that great debate by which the Revolution was accomplished before the first gun was fired; John Adams and his son, whose biographies almost make up the history of the country for eighty years; Pickering, who filled in turn every seat in the cabinet; Webster, the greatest teacher of con

stitutional law, save Marshall; Andrew, the great war governor; Sumner, the echoes of whose voice seem yet audible in the Senate Chamber, by no means make up the whole of the familiar catalogue.

Science will not disdain to look for fitting representatives to the State of Bowditch and John Pickering and Wyman and Pierce, and which contains the birthplace of Franklin and the home and grave of Agassiz.

Are we to hold with Franklin that the world owes more to great inventors than to all its warriors and statesmen? The inventor of the cotton gin, who doubled the value of every acre of cotton-producing land in the South; the inventor of the telegraph, at whose obsequies the sorrow of all nations throbbing simultaneously around the globe was manifested; the discoverer of the uses of ether in surgery, who has disarmed sickness of half its pain and death of half its terrors, may dispute with each other a palm for which there will be no other competitors.

Among historians the names of Bancroft and Sparks and Motley and Prescott and Palfrey and Parkman will endure till the deeds they celebrate are forgotten. "Worthy deeds," said John Milton, "are not often destitute of worthy relators, as by a certain fate great acts and great eloquence have commonly gone hand in hand."

"Native to famous wits

And hospitable, in her sweet recess,"

Massachusetts contributes to the list of poets who have delighted the world the names of Bryant and Emerson and Whittier and Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes.

Among the foremost of Americans in oratory, that foremost of arts, stand Quincy, the Cicero of the Revolution; Otis, that "flame of fire"; the persuasive Choate, the silver-tongued Everett, the majestic Webster.

Of the great lovers of their race, whose pure fame is gained by unselfish devotion of their lives to lessening suffering or reforming vice, Massachusetts has furnished conspicuous examples. Among these great benefactors who have now gone to their reward, it is hard to determine the palm of excellence. To the labors of Horace Mann is due the excellence of the common schools in America, without which liberty must perish, despite of constitution or statute.

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If an archangel should come down from heaven among men, I cannot conceive that he could give utterance to a loftier virtue or clothe his message in more fitting phrase than are found in the pure eloquence in which Channing arraigned slavery, that giant crime of all ages, before the bar of public opinion, and held up the selfish ambition of Napoleon to the condemnation of mankind. "Never before," says the eulogist of Channing, "in the name of humanity and freedom, was grand offender arraigned by such a voice. The sentence of degradation which Channing has passed, confirmed by coming generations, will darken the fame of the warrior more than any defeat of his arms, or compelled abdication of his power."

Doctor Howe, whose youthful service in the war for the independence of Greece, recalling the stories of knight-errantry, has endeared his name to two hemispheres, is yet better known by what he has done for those unfortunate classes of our fellowmen whom God has deprived of intellect or of sense. He gave eyes to the fingers of the blind, he taught the deaf and dumb articulate speech, waked the slumbering intellect in the darkened soul of the idiot, brought comfort, quiet, hope, courage, to the wretched cell of the insane.

To each of these the people of Massachusetts have, in their own way, paid their tribute of honor and reverence. The statue of Horace Mann stands by the portal of the Statehouse. The muse of Whittier and Holmes, the lips of our most distinguished living orators, the genius of his gifted wife, have united in a worthy memorial of Howe. The stately eloquence of Sumner, in his great oration at Cambridge, has built a monument to Channing more enduring than marble or granite, but Channing's published writings, eagerly read wherever the English language prevails, are better than any monument.

Yet I believe Channing and Howe and Mann, were they living to-day, would themselves yield precedence to the constant and courageous heroism of him who said: "I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard"; whose fame

"Over his living head, like heaven is bent

An early and eternal monument."

The act of Congress limits the selection to deceased persons, not exceeding two in number for each State. Massachusetts has

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chosen those who, while they seemed the fittest representatives of what is peculiar in her own character and history, have impressed that character on important public events which have been benefits to the nation at large.

That peculiarity is what is called Puritanism. To that principle, which I will try to define presently, I think it would not be difficult to trace nearly everything which Massachusetts has been able to achieve in any department of excellence. But it has a direct national importance in three conspicuous eras. One of them is too recent to allow of dispassionate consideration. The others are the eras of the foundation of the State and of the American Revolution.

And so, Mr. Speaker, it has come to pass that in the centennial year Massachusetts brings the first and the last of her great Puritans to represent her in the nation's gallery of heroes and patriots. Two hundred and forty-six years have gone by since John Winthrop landed at Salem. It is a hundred years since Samuel Adams set his name at Philadelphia to the charter of that independence which it had been the great purpose of his life to accomplish. Their characters, public and private, have been the subject of an intense historic scrutiny, both hostile and friendly. But the State, not, we hope, having failed to learn whatever new lessons these centuries have brought, still adopts them as the best she has to offer.

I do not use the word Puritan in a restricted sense. I do not mean the bigots or zealots who were the caricature of their generation. I do not discuss the place in history of the men of the English commonwealth. Whether the hypocritical buffoon of Hudibras or the religious enthusiast of Macaulay be the fit type of that generation of Englishmen before whom Europe trembled, we do not need to inquire. I use the word in a large sense, as comprehending the men who led the emigration, made up the bulk of the numbers, established the institutions of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth, and administered their affairs as selfgoverning republics in all but name for more than a century and a half.

Through the vast spaces of human history there have resounded but a few heroic strains. Unless the judgment of those writers who have best conceived and pictured heroism - Milton, Burke, Carlyle, Froude-be at fault, among these there has been none loftier than the Puritanism of New England. The impress