No, my friends, I think man remains the same to-day, as he was in the beginning.  He is not alone a being of reason; he has passions and feelings which require sometimes to be curbed by force; and all prudent people ought to be ready and willing to meet strife when it comes.  To be prepared is the best answer to that question. [Applause.]

Now my friends, the toast you have given me to-night to respond to is somewhat obscure to me.  We have heard to-night enumerated the principles of your society—­which are called “New England ideas.”  They are as perfect as the catechism. [Applause and laughter.] I have heard them supplemented by a sort of codicil, to the effect that a large part of our country—­probably one-half—­is still disturbed, and that the Northern man is not welcome there.  I know of my own knowledge that two-thirds of the territory of the United States are not yet settled.  I believe that when our Pilgrim Fathers landed on Plymouth Rock, they began the war of civilization against barbarism, which is not yet ended in America.  The Nation then, as Mr. Beecher has well said, in the strife begun by our fathers, aimed to reach a higher manhood—­a manhood of virtue, a manhood of courage, a manhood of faith, a manhood that aspires to approach the attributes of God Himself.

Whilst granting to every man the highest liberty known on earth, every Yankee believes that the citizen must be the architect of his own fortune; must carry the same civilization wherever he goes, building school-houses and churches for all alike, and wherever the Yankee has gone thus far he has carried his principles and has enlarged New England so that it now embraces probably a third or a half of the settled part of America.  That has been a great achievement, but it is not yet completed.  Your work is not all finished.

You who sit here in New York, just as your London cousins did two hundred and fifty years ago, know not the struggle that is beyond.  At this very moment of time there are Miles Standishes, under the cover of the snow of the Rocky Mountains, doing just what your forefathers did two hundred and fifty years ago.  They have the same hard struggle before them that your fathers had.  You remember they commenced in New England by building log cabins and fences and tilling the sterile, stony, soil, which Mr. Beecher describes, and I believe these have been largely instrumental in the development of the New England character.  Had your ancestors been cast on the fertile shores of the lower Mississippi, you might not be the same vigorous men you are to-day.  Your fathers had to toil and labor.  That was a good thing for you, and it will be good for your children if you can only keep them in the same tracks.  But here in New York and in Brooklyn, I do not think you now are exactly like your forefathers, but I can take you where you will see real live Yankees, very much the same as your fathers were.  In New York with wealth and station, and everything that makes