assent in Alonzo B. Cornell.  Horace Greeley once said to me, as we were returning from a State convention where he had been a candidate, but the delegates had failed to nominate the fittest man for the place:  “I don’t see why any man wants to be Governor of the State of New York, for there is no one living who can name the last ten Governors on a moment’s notice.”  But tho there have been Governors and Governors, there is, when the gubernatorial office is mentioned, one figure that strides down the centuries before all the rest; that is the old Dutch Governor of New York, with his wooden leg—­Peter Stuyvesant.  There have been heroines, too, who have aroused the poetry and eloquence of all times, but none who have about them the substantial aroma of the Dutch heroine, Anneke Jans.

It is within the memory of men now living when the whole of American literature was dismissed with the sneer of the Edinburgh Review, “Who reads an American book?” But out of the American wilderness a broad avenue to the highway which has been trod by the genius of all times in its march to fame was opened by Washington Irving, and in his footsteps have followed the men who are read of all the world, and who will receive the highest tributes in all times—­Longfellow, and Whittier, and Hawthorne and Prescott.

New York is not only imperial in all those material results which constitute and form the greatest commonwealth in this constellation of commonwealths, but in our political system she has become the arbiter of our national destiny.  As goes New York so goes the Union, and her voice indicates that the next President will be a man with New England blood in his veins or a representative of New England ideas.

And for the gentleman who will not be elected I have a Yankee story.  In the Berkshire hills there was a funeral, and as they gathered in the little parlor there came the typical New England female, who mingles curiosity with her sympathy, and as she glanced around the darkened room she said to the bereaved widow, “When did you get that new eight-day clock?” “We ain’t got no new eight-day clock,” was the reply.  “You ain’t?  What’s that in the corner there?” “Why no, that’s not an eight-day clock, that’s the deceased; we stood him on end, to make room for the mourners.”

Up to within fifty years ago all roads in New England led to Boston; but within the last fifty years every byway and highway in New England leads to New York.  New York has become the capital of New England, and within her limits are more Yankees than in any three New England States combined.  The boy who is to-day ploughing the stony hillside in New England, who is boarding around and teaching school, and who is to be the future merchant-prince or great lawyer, or wise statesman, looks not now to Boston, but to New York, as the El Dorado of his hopes.  And how generously, sons of New England, have we treated you?  We have put you in the best offices; we have made