The first point in the sentiment proposed recognizes New England as the mother of two colleges.  I think we should do well also to call to mind, especially under the circumstances by which we are surrounded this evening, that New England was not merely the mother of two colleges which have had some influence in this land, but that New England, with all its glory and its achievements, was, in a certain sense, the creation of a college.  It would be easy to show that had it not been for the existence of one or two rather inferior colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, there never would have been a New England.  In these colleges were gathered and trained not a few of the great leaders of opinion under whose influence the father of New England became a great political power in the mother country.  It is not to the Pilgrim Fathers alone who landed at Plymouth on December 22, 1620, that New England owes its characteristic principles and its splendid renown, but it is also to the leaders of the great Puritan party in England, who reinforced that immigration by the subsequent higher and nobler life of the planters of Massachusetts Bay, conspicuous among whom was the distinguished and ever-to-be-honored Governor Winthrop. [Applause.]

It was from these colleges that so many strong-hearted young men went forth into political public life in England to act the scholar in politics, and who, as scholars in politics, enunciated those new principles and new theories of government which made Old England glorious for a time, and which made New England the power for good which she afterward became, first at her home in the old States, and in all their extension westward even to this hour.  These scholars sought emphatically a reform of the civil service in England.  That was their mission.  They vindicated their principles upon the scaffold and their rights upon the field of battle at home, and they transmitted that spirit to the emigrants who came out from among them before the great rebellion reached its great crisis and finished its memorable history.

While, then, we honor the universities of which New England has been the mother, let us remember that New England owes its being to a university.  In remembering this, we shall be prepared to follow in the steps of our fathers, and to be mindful of what we ourselves owe to our own institutions of learning.

In respect to the rivalry between Yale and Harvard, which was noticed in the sentiment to which I speak, and in reply to the suggestions which have been offered by the President of Harvard, I will venture a single remark.  You, sir, who are learned in our New England history, are not unfamiliar with the saying which was once somewhat current, that when a man was found in Boston, in the earlier generations, who was a little too bad to live with, they sent him to Rhode Island [Laughter.]; and when they found a man who was a little too good to be a comfortable neighbor, they sent him