Gentlemen, it is with honest pride and fresh inspiration that we gather once a year to revive our enkindling story.  The Santa Maria, with its antique form and its flying pennant, contrasting the past with the present, amid the dazzling and now vanishing splendors of the wondrous White City, has this year recalled the discovery of America.  But the jewel is more precious than the casket.  The speaking picture appeals to us more than its stately setting.  And heroic as was the voyage of the Santa Maria across a trackless sea to an unknown continent, it was the nobler mission of the Mayflower to bring the priceless seeds of principle and liberty which have blossomed in the resplendent development and progress of our great free Republic.  Conscience incarnate in Brewster and Bradford, in Winthrop and Winslow, smote Plymouth Rock; and from that hour there has poured forth from its rich fountain a perennial stream of intellectual and moral force which has flooded and fertilized a broad continent.  The Puritan spirit was duty; the Puritan creed was conscience; the Puritan principle was individual freedom; the Puritan demand was organized liberty, guaranteed and regulated by law. [Applause.] That spirit is for to-day as much as for two centuries ago.  It fired at Lexington the shot heard round the world, and it thundered down the ages in the Emancipation Proclamation.  It lives for no narrow section and it is limited to no single class.  The soul that accepts God and conscience and equal manhood has the Puritan spirit, whether he comes from Massachusetts or Virginia, from Vermont or Indiana; whether you call him Quaker or Catholic, disciple of Saint Nicholas or follower of Saint George. [Applause.] The Puritan did not pass away with his early struggles.  He has changed his garb and his speech; he has advanced with the progress of the age; but in his fidelity to principle and his devotion to duty he lives to-day as truly as he lived in the days of the Puritan Revolution and the Puritan Pilgrimage.  His spirit shines in the lofty teachings of Channing and in the unbending principles of Sumner, in the ripened wisdom of Emerson and in the rhythmical lessons of Longfellow.  The courageous John Pym was not more resolute and penetrating in leading the great struggle in the Long Parliament than was George F. Edmunds in the Senate of the United States.  And the intrepid and sagacious John Hampden, heroic in battle and supreme in council, wise, steadfast, and true, was but a prototype of Benjamin Harrison.

HERBERT SPENCER

THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

     [Speech of Herbert Spencer at a dinner given in his honor in New
     York City, November 9, 1882.  William M. Evarts presided.]