II.

THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND IN THE

FUTURE OF THE COUNTRY.

AND THEY THAT SHALL BE OF THEE SHALL BUILD THE OLD WASTE PLACES; THOU SHALT RAISE UP THE FOUNDATIONS OF MANY GENERATIONS; AND THOU SHALT BE CALLED, THE REPAIRER OF THE BREACH, THE RESTORER of PATHS TO DWELL IN.-Isaiah lviii. 12.

E cannot to-day be narrow, and shut our thoughts within the limits of the Commonwealth.

WE cannot be row, sout

THE TIMES are educating us all into views and sympathies broad as the land. We stand in these hours on an eminence, and our horizon is the borders of the Republic. We are lifted to the dome of our nationality, and our field of vision stretches to the water-line that marks either ocean shore, the blue of the Lakes and the blue of the Gulf.

We cannot name our State, or any State, without thinking at once of our whole country. We are weaned from the idea that a State is complete by itself. It is one component part of a Federal Government, held to its sisters by a deathless bond. It is a branch of a living and fruitful vine, in which alone it has life and fruitfulness. Except it abide in the vine,-we may reverently apply the Scripture, it" is cast forth as a branch, and is withered;

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THE WORK OF NEW ENGLAND. I

and men gather them and cast, them into the fire, and they are burned."

Let the stars in the heavens break from their constellations, but let not one on our field of blue part the chain of celestial gravitation and attempt to shine alone. It shall soon become a "wandering star," "going out in the blackness of darkness forever."

We belong to a nation—a nation living still fair and strong and whole, undivided and indivisible, wearing still on its brow, for all the jealous kingdoms to read, the old familiar inscription, "E pluribus unum," and girding itself anew for the race of the future.

And the question which I desire briefly to discuss today is this: What is the work of Massachusetts, and of New England, in this near future of the whole country?

We may say, in the first place, that the life of New England cannot be dissevered from the national life. There has been in some quarters certain idle and flippant talk in reference to such a readjustment of the national boundaries as should leave this old Puritan Commonwealth and her five sisters outside the walls of the new confederation. But our connection with the Republic is not a matter of territorial contiguity and geographical lines. Let men run border lines as they please; let them frame ordinances of separation; let them build a Tartar wall between us and the great homestead; neither civil nor material barriers can exile us from the family circle. It were just as possible to separate from the loaf the leaven that made it light and sweet, or from a human life the principles and influences of its early nurture.

New England is not a certain limited portion of the national domain, a sharp eastern angle that can be clipped off. No map of the Union gives to the eye her full and proper extent. No engineering art can explore and project her share of our continental heritage.

Her life is ubiquitous in the nation. From her fountain heart the warm arterial currents have circulated through the whole body and flowed out to the remotest extremities. Her sons have gone forth into every habitable place of the broad land. They have carried with them her enterprise, her intelligence, her art, her ingenuity, the pure and ordered life of her homes, the tranquil securities of her law-abiding communities, her system of common schools, academies, and colleges, her reverence for the Sabbath, the memory and the love of her household altars and public sanctuaries. Their first harvests as they have occupied and opened up virgin soil have been not what the earth yielded to the hand of tillage; they sowed, first of all, Puritan ideas,—the seeds of New England institutions; and that which grew earliest beneath their husbandry has been the transplanted life of their own native hills and valleys. Here are indestructible channels which cannot be closed, and through which the fountained abundance of New England's fulness has flowed out and is flowing still across the prairies, and along the central valley, and through the wilderness, and unto the far Pacific coast. New England can no more be divorced from the Union than the maternity of a mother from her children. That maternity is in their form and features; it gives the coloring to cheek and hair; it looks from

their eyes; it speaks from their tongues; it runs in their veins; it beats in their hearts. Not even by miracle could it be separated from them.

Separate New England from the Union! Give us back our sons and daughters, more than half a million of them, from all the homes of the land outside our borders! Give us back our millions of capital that have already changed so much of the western wilderness to a smiling garden, whitened the length of its rivers with the foam of swift steamers, and braided over the land the iron strands of trade and travel; turn back upon us the deep streams of wealth that flow out annually to those granaries of the West for their cereal stores! Give us back the forceful and fruitful words that have gone forth from her press, her pulpit, her rostrum of public oratory, from every platform and every page on which the eloquent lips of her sons have spoken, -words that have quickened and controlled the intellectual life of generations, and guided popular movements in every part of the country; this public speech of New England that has gone forth free and fresh and vital as the air of heaven, gather it up and restore it to its authors; separate it from the popular mind and heart, from the principles and the practice of our homebred millions! Give us back the messengers of a pure gospel that have gone forth at our sending, with large self-sacrifice, to plant the banner of the cross in western wilds," and bear it on in the very van of our spreading civilization, and with them the churches they have built, and the fair Christian order they have reared amid the outlawry of frontier settlements! Give us back

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the broad, bright river of our charities, that has branched to so many thresholds of suffering through these four tragic years! Give us back the brave blood that has drenched a hundred battle-fields, and reddened the trail of New England feet wherever the armies of the Union have marched!

When all this can be done, when the nation will consent to this, then may men talk about "leaving New England out in the cold." Till then, her place is in the warm hearts of the people, her life mingled with the life of the nation, "one and inseparable."

We have, we may say, in the second place, to keep New England undegenerate.

The greatness of New England's influence is not so much in what she does as in what she is. The two go together. When she works, when she speaks, it is the background of character that lends to both their weight. Just as when an individual utters his thoughts, — it is not so much what he says as who says it. The chief emphasis of words and of deeds comes from the heart of the doer and the speaker. There is no premium in the sphere of moral power upon idleness, frivolity, and corruption. Both for men and for communities, if we would have the influence pure and strong, these attributes must first be demonstrated in the character. It is when those who speak in the name of New England can say, "Look at her," that their oratory is beyond tongues of flame and words of fire. We have it in charge, then, to guard the purity and nourish the strength of this home-life. The fountain must be full and clear if the streams are to be