There are some things even more important than the highest culture.  The West is the Almighty’s reserve ground, and as the world is filling up.  He is turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres, and is sending there the rain as well as the sunshine.  A high and glorious destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the other side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must find waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy people: 

  “Who love the land because it is their own,
    And scorn to give aught other reason why;
  Would shake hands with a King upon his throne,
    And think it kindness to his Majesty.”

We are beginning to realize, however, that the invitation we have been extending to all the world has been rather too general.  So far we have been able to make American citizens in fact as well as name out of the foreign-born immigrants.  The task was light while we had the honest and industrious to deal with, but the character of some of the present immigration has brought a conviction which we hope you share, that the sacred rights of citizenship should be withheld from a certain class of aliens in race and language, who seek the protection of this Government, until they shall have at least learned that the red in our flag is commingled with the white and blue and the stars. [Great applause.]

In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee reinforcements step rapidly to the front.  Every year she needs more of them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater.  Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States, and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in the future even more than in the past, the heads of the New England households weary not in the good work. [Laughter and applause.]

In these later days of “booms” and New Souths and Great Wests; when everybody up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to apologize for it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a sort of tendency to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much considered; and New England being small in area and most of her distinguished people being dead, she is just now somewhat under an eclipse.  But in her past she has undying fame.  You of New England and her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness.  The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble traditions.  In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that with each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet—­