We can never forget the hardships which they were forced to endure, but at the same time we must recognize that they had some advantages over us.  They escaped some of the inflictions to which we have been compelled to submit.  They braved the wintry blast of Plymouth, but they never knew the everlasting wind of the United States Senate. [Laughter.] They slumbered under the long sermons of Cotton Mather, but they never dreamed of the fourteen consecutive hours of Nebraska Allen or Nevada Stewart.  They battled with Armenian dogmas and Antinomian heresies, but they never experienced the exhilarating delights of the Silver debate or throbbed under the rapturous and tumultuous emotions of a Tariff Schedule. [Laughter.]

They had their days of festivity.  They observed the annual day of Thanksgiving with a reverent, and not infrequently with a jocund, spirit; but advanced as they were in many respects, they never reached that sublime moral elevation and that high state of civilization which enable us in our day to see that the only true way to observe Thanksgiving is to shut up the churches and revel in the spiritual glories of the flying wedge and the triumphant touchdown. [Laughter.] Their calendar had three great red-letter days of celebration:  Commencement day, which expressed and emphasized the foremost place they gave to education in their civil and religious polity; Training or Muster day, which illustrated the spirit and the skill that gave them victory over the Indians and made them stand undaunted on Bunker Hill under Warren and Putnam until above the gleaming column of red-coats they could look into the whites of the enemies’ eyes; and Election day, upon which, with its election sermon and its solemn choice of rulers, they acted out their high sense of patriotic duty to the Commonwealth.  We are deeply concerned in these days about the debasement of the ballot-box.  Perhaps we could find a panacea in the practice of our Pilgrim Fathers.  They enacted a law that the right of suffrage should be limited to church members in good standing.  Suppose we had such a law now, what a mighty revolution it would work either in exterminating fraud or in promoting piety!  “Men and Brethren!” said the colored parson, “two ways are open before you, the broad and narrow way which leads to perdition, and the straight and crooked way which leads to damnation.” [Laughter.] We have before us now the two ways of stuffed ballot-boxes and empty pews, and our problem is to change the stuffing from the ballot-boxes to the pews.  I am not altogether sure which result would be accomplished; but it is quite clear that if the law of our Fathers did not destroy corruption in politics, it would at least kindle a fresh interest in the church. [Laughter.]