the inspiration of a man recently deceased, who will stand in history as a monument to the clemency and magnanimity of a great and free people) to break up the Union in order to insure the perpetuity of slavery, then a man, plain of speech, rude of garb[12] descended from the Lincolns of Hingham, in Plymouth County, sounded a rally for Union and freedom [tremendous applause]; and, hark! there is the tramp, tramp of the fishermen from Marblehead; there are the Connecticut boys from old Litchfield; and there is the First Rhode Island; and there are the sailors from Casco Bay; and the farmers’ sons from old Coos, and from along the Onion River, their hearts beating with the enthusiasm of liberty, while their steps keep pace with the drum-beat that salutes the national flag. [Applause.] And, see! is that a thunder-cloud in the North?  No, it is the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, made up of American citizens of African descent, officered by the best blood of Suffolk, and at their head Robert G. Shaw, going down to die in the trenches before Fort Wagner.  And there is the man whom a kindly Providence yet spares to us, descended from the Shermans of Connecticut, preparing for the march that is to cleave the Confederacy in twain. [Cheers for General Sherman.] And there is the silent man, eight generations removed from Matthew Grant (who landed at Dorchester in 1630), destined to make the continent secure for liberty and to inaugurate the New South, dating from Appomattox, with traditions of freedom, teeming with a prosperity rivalling that of New England, a prosperity begotten of the marriage of labor and intelligence. [Continued applause.]

In times somewhat more recent, when a political campaign was under full headway, and when politicians were husbanding truth with their wonted frugality and dispensing fiction with their habitual lavishness, there sprung up a man removed by only two generations from the Lows of Salem, who, in the resources of a mind capable of such things, devised what he was pleased to call “Sunday-school politics”; who has had the further hardihood to be made president of the college which is the glory of your metropolis, designing, no doubt, to infuse into the mind of the tender youth of the New Amsterdam his baleful idea, which, so far as I can make out, has as its essence the conduct of political affairs on the basis of the Decalogue.

The campaign over, when the victors are rolling up their sleeves and are preparing to dispense the spoils according to the hunger and thirst of their retainers, to their amazed horror there is heard the voice of a native of Rhode Island, who has conceived a scheme almost too monstrous for mention, which he designates “Civil Service Reform,” and who with characteristic effrontery has got up a society, of which he is president, for the purpose of diffusing his blood-curdling sentiments.  Do we need to look further for a reply to the question, “Why are the New Englanders unpopular?” Almost any man is unpopular who goes around with his pockets full of moral dynamite. [Applause.]