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THE MANY-SIDED PURITAN

[Speech of Horace Porter at the eighty-second annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1887.  Ex-Judge Horace Russell, the President of the Society, in introducing General Porter, said:  “James T. Brady used to say that a good lawyer imbibed his law rather than read it. [Laughter.] If that proposition holds true in other regards, the gentleman whom I am to call to the next toast is one of the very best of New Englanders—­General Horace Porter [applause], who will speak to ‘Puritan Influence.’”]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—­While you were eating Forefathers’ dinner here a year ago, I happened to be in Mexico, but on my return I found that the Puritan influence had extended to me, for I was taken for the distinguished head of this organization, and was in receipt of no end of letters addressed to General Horace Russell and Judge Horace Porter and Mr. Horace Russell and Porter, President of the New England Society, and all begging for a copy of Grady’s[5] speech.  Distant communities had got the names of the modern Horatii mixed. [Laughter.] In replying I had to acknowledge that my nativity barred me out from the moral realms of this puritanical society, and I could only coincide with Charles II when he said he always admired virtue, but he never could imitate it. [Laughter and applause.] When the Puritan influence spread across the ocean; when it was imported here as part of the cargo of the Mayflower, the crew of the craft, like sensible men, steered for the port of New York, but a reliable tradition informs us that the cook on board that vessel chopped his wood on deck and always stood with his broadaxe on the starboard side of the binnacle, and that this mass of ferruginous substance so attracted the needle that the ship brought up in Plymouth harbor.  And the Puritans did not reach New York harbor for a couple of hundred years thereafter, and then in the persons of the members of the New England Society.  It is seen that the same influences are still at work, for the fact that these Puritans have brought up in Delmonico’s haven of rest is entirely owing to the attractions of the cook. [Laughter and applause.]

The old Puritan was not the most rollicking, the jolliest, or the most playful of men.  He at times amused himself sadly; he was given to a mild disregard of the conventionalities.  He had suppressed bear-baiting, not, it is believed, because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the audience.  He found the Indians were the proprietors of the land, and he felt himself constrained to move against them with his gun with a view to increasing the number of absentee landlords. [Laughter and applause.] He found the Indians on one side and the witches on the other.  He was surrounded with troubles.  He had to keep the Indians under fire and the witches