[Speech of Rev. Dr. Heman L. Wayland at the eighty-fourth annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 23, 1889.  The President, Cornelius N. Bliss, proposed the query for Dr. Wayland, “Why are New Englanders Unpopular?” enforcing it with the following quotations:  “Do you question me as an honest man should do for my simple true judgment?” [Much Ado About Nothing, Act I, Sc.  I], and “Merit less solid less despite has bred:  the man that makes a character makes foes” [Edward Young].  Turning to Dr. Wayland, Mr. Bliss said:  “Our sister, the New England Society of Philadelphia, to-night sends us greeting in the person of her honored President, whom I have the pleasure of presenting to you.”  The eloquence of Dr. Wayland was loudly applauded; and Chauncey M. Depew declared that he had heard one of the best speeches to which he had ever listened at a New England dinner.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:—­That I am here this evening is as complete a mystery to me as to you.  I do not know why your Society, at whose annual meetings orators are as the sand upon the seashore for multitude, should call upon Philadelphia, a city in which the acme of eloquence is attained by a Friends’ Yearly Meeting, “sitting under the canopy of silence.”  I can only suppose that you designed to relieve the insufferable brilliancy of your annual festival, that you wished to dilute the highly-flavored, richly-colored, full-bodied streams of the Croton with the pure, limpid, colorless (or, at any rate, only drab-colored) waters of the Schuylkill. [Laughter.]

My first and wiser impulse was to decline the invitation with which you honored me, or rather the Society of which I am the humblest member.  But I considered the great debt we have been under to you for the loan of many of your most accomplished speakers:  of Curtis, whose diction is chaste as the snows of his own New England, while his zeal for justice is as fervid as her July sun; of Depew, who, as I listen to him, makes me believe that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and that in a former day his soul occupied the body of one of the Puritan fathers, and that for some lapse he was compelled to spend a period of time in the body of a Hollander [laughter]; of Beaman,[9] one of the lights of your bar; of Evarts, who, whether as statesman or as orator, delights in making historic periods.  And this year you have favored us with General Porter,[10] whom we have been trying to capture for our annual dinner, it seems to me, ever since the Mayflower entered Plymouth Bay.

We have condoled with these honored guests as they with tears have told us of their pitiful lot, have narrated to us how, when they might have been tilling the soil (or what passes for soil) of the New Hampshire hills, shearing their lambs, manipulating their shares (with the aid of plough-handles), and watering their stock at the nearest brook, and might have been on speaking acquaintance with the Ten Commandments and