main policy of all civil society, and faith in God, its only guaranty of permanence, were wanting or died out, and they were turned under by the ploughshare of Time to feed a nobler growth.

As we value this heritage which we have thus received, as we are penetrated with wonder and gratitude at the costly sacrifices and heroic labors of our ancestors, by which it has been acquired for us; as in each preceding generation we observe no unworthy defection from the original stock, no waste of the rich possession, but ever its jealous protection, its generous increase, so do we feel an immeasurable obligation to transmit this heritage unimpaired, and yet ampler, to our posterity, to maintain unbroken the worth and honor which hitherto have marked their lineage. This obligation can only be fulfilled by imitating the wisdom of our fathers, by observing the maxims of their policy, studying the true spirit of their institutions, and acting, in our day, and in our circumstances, with the same devotion to principle, the same fidelity to duty. If we neglect this, if we run wild in the enjoyment of the great inheritance, if we grow arrogant in our prosperity, and cruel in our power, if we come to confound freedom in religion with freedom from religion, and independence by law with independence of law, if we substitute for a public spirit a respect to private advantage, if we run from all civil duties, and desert all social obligations, if we make our highest conservatism the taking care of ourselves, our shame and our disaster will alike be signal.

Nor, if we will rightly consider the aspect of our times, and justly estimate the great conflicting social forces at work in the nation, shall we lack for noble incentives to follow in the bright pathway of duty in

which our fathers led, nor for great objects to aim at and accomplish. While we rejoice that from no peculiar institutions of New England does occasion of discontent or disquietude arise, to vex the public conscience, or disturb the public serenity; that the evils and dangers of ignorance and sloth are imbedded in no masses of her population, local or derivative; that not for her children are borne our heavy burdens of pauperism and crime; let us no less rejoice that, clogged by no impediment and exhausted by no feebleness of her own, all the energies of New England may be devoted to succor and sustain at every point of weakness, all her power to uphold and confirm every element of strength, in whatever region of our common country, in whatever portion of her various population.

Guided by the same high motives, imbued with the same deep wisdom, warmed with the same faithful spirit as were our ancestors, what social evil is there so great as shall withstand us, what public peril so dark as shall dismay us? Men born in the lifetime of Mary Allerton, the last survivor of the Mayflower's company, lived through the Revolution; men born before the Revolution still live. Of the hundred and one persons who landed from the Mayflower, one half were buried by early spring; yet now the blood of the New England Puritans beats in the hearts of more than seven millions of our countrymen. The slow and narrow influences of personal example and of public speech, by which alone, in the days of the early settlement, were all social impressions made and diffused, are now replaced by a thousand rapid agencies by which public opinion is formed and circulated. Population seems no longer local and stationary, but ever more and more migratory, intermingled and transfused; and, if the

virtue and the power, to which to-day we pay our homage, survive in the sons of the Pilgrims, doubt not their influences will soon penetrate and pervade the whole general mass of society throughout the nation; fear not but that equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty will bind this whole people together in a perfect, a perpetual union.

ORATION

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, M. D.

THE PILGRIMS OF PLYMOUTH

JOHN PIERPONT, D.D.

1855

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

(1807-1897.)

JOHN PIERPONT

(1785-1866.)

THE orator of 1855, belonging to the present as fully as to the past, needs no introduction. This year the society returned to its early custom, and a poem formed a part of the program. Dr. John Pierpont, the poet of the occasion, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He studied law, but later entered the ministry and united with the Unitarian denomination. His poems were widely known, especially his occasional pieces. The political element had naturally entered largely of late into the literary exercises of the society. Almost any political creed might have found satisfaction in this celebration at the Church of the Puritans. The verses of Dr. Pierpont, though he was then over seventy years of age, would have been quoted with enthusiasm by the youngest and wildest Abolitionist, while Dr. Holmes, his junior by thirty years, stood frankly for the most conservative element of the North. One sentiment of the orator in regard to slavery was met with a hiss, to which incident Dr. Pierpont referred at the dinner the following evening. "I have prepared," he said, "some lines, should it ever occur again, which would run somewhat in the following fashion:

"Our brother Holmes's gadfly was a thing
To Io known by its tormenting sting.
The noisome insect still is known by this,

But geese and serpents by their harmless hiss."