But, Mr. President, I certainly am in earnest sympathy with the patriotic sentiment expressed in the toast which you have been pleased to assign to me to-night, saying, in effect, that the American is composed of the best strains of Europe, and the American cannot be worthy of his ancestors unless he aims to combine within himself the good qualities of all.  America has gained much by being the conglomerate country that she is, made up of a commingling of the blood of other races.  It is a well-known fact in the crossing of breeds that the best traits predominate in the result.  We in this land, have gained much from the purity of those bloods; we have suffered little from the taint.

It is well in this material age, when we are dwelling so much upon posterity, not to be altogether oblivious to pedigree.  It has been well said that he who does not respect his ancestors will never be likely to achieve anything for which his descendants will respect him.  Man learns but very little in this world from precept; he learns something from experience; he learns much from example, and the “best teachers of humanity are the lives of worthy men.”

We have a great many admirable so-called foreign societies in New York, and they are all doing good work—­good work in collecting interesting historical data in regard to the ancestors who begat them; in regard to the lands from which they came—­good work in the broad field of charity.  But it is the Holland Society which seems to be a little closer to us than the others—­more our Society, even with those of us who have no Dutch blood in our veins.  We feel that these old Dutch names are really more closely associated in our minds with the city of New York than with Holland itself.

The men from whom you sprang were well calculated to carry on the great work undertaken by them.  In the first place, in that good old land they had educated the conscience.  The conscience never lost its hold upon the man.  He stood as firm in his convictions as the rock to its base.  His religion was a religion of the soul, and not of the senses.  He might have broken the tables of stone on which the laws were written; he never would have broken those laws themselves.  He turned neither to the past with regret nor to the future with apprehension.  He was a man inured to trials; practised in self-abnegation; educated in the severe school of adversity; and that little band which set out from Holland to take up its career in the New World was well calculated to undertake the work which Providence had marked out for them.  Those men had had breathed into their nostrils at their very birth the true spirit of liberty.  Somehow or other liberty seemed to be indigenous in that land.  They imbibed that true spirit of liberty which does not mean unbridled license of the individual, but that spirit of liberty which can turn blind submission into rational obedience; that spirit of liberty which Hall says stifles the voices of kings, dissipates the