more than General McClellan can.”  “Dear me,” said the corporal, “it would be a great comfort if there was somebody that did know about things”—­and I saw my chance.  “True, corporal,” I observed, “that’s a very natural feeling; and the blessed fact is there is One who does know everything, both past and future, about you and me, and about this army; who knows when we are going to move, and where to, and what’s going to happen; knows the whole thing.”  “Oh,” says the corporal, “you mean old Scott!” [Laughter.]

The Forefathers generally spared people the trouble of guessing what they were driving at. [Applause.]

That for which they valued education was that it gave men power to think and reason and form judgments and communicate and expound the same, and so capacitated them for valid membership of the Church and of the State.  And that was still another original Yankee notion.

Not often has the nature and the praise of it been more worthily expressed, that I am aware of, than in these sentences, which I lately happened upon, the name of whose author I will, by your leave, reserve till I have repeated them:  “Next to religion they prized education.  If their lot had been cast in some pleasant place of the valley of the Mississippi, they would have sown wheat and educated their children; but as it was, they educated their children and planted whatever might grow and ripen on that scanty soil with which capricious nature had tricked off and disguised the granite beds beneath.  Other colonies would have brought up some of the people to the school; they, if I may be allowed so to express it, let down the school to all the people, not doubting but by doing so the people and the school would rise of themselves.”

I do not know if Cardinal Gibbons is present; I do not recognize him.  If he is, I am pleased to have had the honor to recite in his hearing and to commend to his attention these words, so true, so just, so appreciative, of a distinguished ecclesiastic of his communion; for they were spoken by the late Archbishop Hughes in a public lecture in this city in 1852. [Applause.]

I would, however, much rather have recited them in the ears of those Protestant Americans—­alas, that there should be born New Englanders among them, that is, such according to the flesh, not according to the spirit—­who are wont to betray a strange relish for disparaging both the principles and the conduct of our great sires in that early day when they were sowing in weakness what has ever since been rising with power.

There have always, indeed, been those who were fond of spying the blemishes of New England, of illustrating human depravity by instances her sinners contributed.  With the open spectacle of armies of beggars—­God’s beggars they are; I do not object to them—­continually swarming in across her borders, as bees to their meadows, and returning not empty, they keep on calling her close-fisted.  They even blaspheme her weather—­her warm-hearted summers and her magnificent winters.  There is, to be sure, a time along in March—­but let that pass. [Laughter.]