It was his beauty that he was so, for it grew out of and was befitting his circumstances.  And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil—­and some of it is left—­thinking of its origin.  It is the signature of a fighting far more than of an ascetic ancestry—­memorial of a new Pass of Thermopylae held by the latest race of Spartans on the shores of a new world. [Applause.]

It may be doubted if ever in the history of mankind was displayed a quality of public courage—­of pure, indomitable pluck—­surpassing that of the New England plantations in their infant day.  No condition of its extremest proof was lacking.  While the Bay Colony, for example, was in the pinch of its first wrestle with Nature for a living, much as ever able to furnish its table with a piece of bread—­with the hunger-wolf never far away from the door, and behind that wolf the Narragansett and the Pequot, at what moment to burst into savagery none could tell—­in the season when mere existence was the purchase of physical toil, universal and intense, and of watching night and day—­there came from the old country, from the high places of authority, the peremptory mandate:  Send us back that charter!  Under the clause of it granting you the rule of your own affairs, you are claiming more than was intended or can be allowed.  Send it back!  And what was the answer?  Mind, there were less than 5,000 souls of them, all told:  less than 1,000 grown men.  On the one hand the power of England—­on the other that scrap of a new-born State, sore pressed with difficulties already.

What was the answer?  Why, they got out some old cannon they had and mounted them, and moulded a stock of bullets, and distributed powder, and took of every male citizen above the age of sixteen an oath of allegiance to Massachusetts—­and then set their teeth and waited to see what would happen.  And that was their answer.  It meant distinctly:  Our charter, which we had of the King’s majesty (and therefore came we hither), is our lawful possession—­fair title to the territory we occupy and the rights we here exercise.  And whoever wants it has got to come and take it.  Surrender it we never will! [Applause.]

Nor was that the only time.  Again and again during the Colony’s initial stage, when it was exceedingly little of stature and had enough to do to keep the breath of life in it, that demand was renewed with rising anger and with menaces; yet never could those Puritans of the Bay be scared into making a solitary move of any kind toward compliance with it.  David with his sling daring Goliath in armor is an insufficient figure of that nerve, that transcendent grit, that superb gallantry.  Where will you look for its parallel?  I certainly do not know. [Applause.]

They used to tell during the war of a colonel who was ordered to assault a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and became immovable.  Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty, called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice:  “Oh, don’t give it up so!  Forward again!  Forward!  Charge!  Great heavens, men, do you want to live forever?” [Laughter.]