“the mean Yankees,” “the stingy Yankees,” “the close-fisted Yankees,” “the tin-peddling Yankees,” and, above all, the terse and condensed collocation, “those d——­d—­those blessed Yankees,” the blessing being comprised between two d’s, as though conferred by a benevolent doctor of divinity. [Laughter.] I remember in the olden time, in the years beyond the flood, when the Presidential office was vacant and James Buchanan was drawing the salary, at a period before the recollection of any one present except myself, although possibly my esteemed friend, your secretary, Mr. Hubbard, may have heard his grandparents speak of it as a reminiscence of his youth, there was a poem going about, descriptive of the feelings of our brethren living between us and the Equator, running somewhat thus: 

  “’Neath the shade of the gum-tree the Southerner sat,
  A-twisting the brim of his palmetto hat,
  And trying to lighten his mind of a’load
  By humming the words of the following ode: 
    ’Oh! for a nigger, and oh! for a whip;
    Oh! for a cocktail, and oh! for a nip;
    Oh! for a shot at old Greeley and Beecher;
    Oh! for a crack at a Yankee school-teacher.’ 
  And so he kept oh-ing for all he had not,
  Not contented with owing for all that he’d got.”

Why does the world minify our intelligence by depreciating our favorite article of diet, and express the ultimate extreme of mental pauperism by saying of him on whose intellect they would heap contempt, “He doesn’t know beans”? [Laughter.] And it is within my recollection that there was a time when it was proposed to reconstruct the Union of the States, with New England left out.  Why, I repeat it, the intense unpopularity of New England?

For one thing, it seems to me, we are hated because of our virtues; we are ostracized because men are tired of hearing about “New England, the good.”  The virtues of New England seem to italicize the moral poverty of mankind at large.  The fact that the very first act of our foremothers, even before the landing was made, two hundred and sixty-nine years ago, was to go on shore and do up the household linen, which had suffered from the voyage of ninety days, is a perpetual reproof to those nations among whom there is a great opening for soap, who have a great many saints’ days, but no washing day. [Laughter and applause.] When men nowadays are disposed to steal a million acres from the Indians, it detracts from their enjoyment to read what Governor Josiah Winslow wrote in 1676:  “I think I can clearly say that, before the present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.”  When our fellow-citizens of other States look at their public buildings, every stone in which tells of unpaid loans; when they remember how they have scaled and scaled the unfortunate people who were guilty of the crime of having money to lend,