Malden, Massachusetts

“ These well-worn boards are holy ground. Here Andrew Malden lived; by that lounge he became a changed man; from that old rocker he went home to God. By yonder gate I first met her whom you all knew and loved; to this home, torn and crushed by life's troubles, I have fled like a child at dusk to its mother's arms, and in these rooms God has comforted and strengthened my heart. I love you all. Not always have we seen alike; you have not always loved me; but, some day, we shall know as we are known; some day we shall see face to face.
"I love these old mountains. ”

“ The fact was that, though Andrew Malden had grown old in Grizzly county, and no face was more familiar, no one knew him. He was a hard man, but not as the people meant. There are two kinds of stern men in this world: Those who are without hearts, who take pleasure in the suffering of others; and those who, repulsed sometime, somewhere, have closed the portals of their inmost souls and hid away within themselves. ”

“ That night, Andy Malden left the Kentucky hills forever. The news of gold in California was in the air. He would join the mad procession that, over plain and isthmus, was going hither. He would go as far from the old life as deserts and mountains would put him.
So he came to Gold City. With a diligence far more systematic than the others, he had washed the gold from Frost Creek and off Mormon Bar. Other men lost all they found in daylight over the gaming table at midnight. He never gambled. All the others who succeeded went below to the great city or back to the States to enjoy their gains. ”

“ The people who had known Jim Malden looked at one another. The stranger had thrown his hat back. He had shown his face squarely and honestly; his eyes were clear and gem-brilliant; his face was the kind that any man can trust. For two years the memory of the shaded face and the silence had made a suspicion of this man, but when he told his story the suspicions vanished. They closed the store, and they all walked out to the stone quarry. ”

“ There are manufactures of crystallized salt, breweries, an oyster fishery and some shipping. On Osea Island, in the Blackwater estuary, there is a farm colony for the unemployed. A mile west of Maldon are remains of Beeleigh Abbey, a Premonstratensian foundation of the 12th century. They consist of the chapter-house and another chamber, and are of fine Early English work. The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. ”

“ One might do worse than live at Maldon, where good houses are to be had at a bargain, and where in the summer-time, far from the wicked world, there is a good deal of boating, and where in the winter time, in the coming glacial era, which Sir Robert Ball confidently predicts as reserved for the people of England, you may skate as far as Chelmsford, a consummation by no means devoutly to be wished. For bicycles Maldon is by no means favourable, incredible as it may seem to those who will persist in believing that Essex is a flat country. ”

“ How quickly, when a fellow starts down hill, he gets under way! That first Sunday picnic had borne its fruit. The Sunday-school at Frost Creek never knew him now. That little Testament was at the bottom of his trunk. Fear of the old man had saved him from an open life of wrong, and a certain pride made him disdain to be on a level with Dan Dean and the Gold City gang. Andrew Malden saw the change and yet did not understand it. He never talked with people enough to hear the rumors afloat of the Sunday horse-races, or of the midnight revel on the Fourth of July at the Yellow Jacket. ”

“ In 1833 Malden was appointed, jointly with Thomas Hewitt Key [q. v.] , head-master of University College school, but resigned in 1842. His death took place on 4 July 1876 at his residence in Belsize Square, South Hampstead. A Malden medal and scholarship (of the value of about 20l.) , open to men and women, were established in 1878 by the subscribers to the Malden memorial fund. ”

“ The nation is so accustomed to admire her glorious deeds for freedom, that with this expectation their eyes are turned upon her. Massachusetts can do nothing in secret; Massachusetts can do nothing for herself alone; every one of her acts involves a hundred-fold responsibility. What Massachusetts does is felt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But Massachusetts need only be herself, in order to be great. ”

“ Worcester, nestling among the hills along the Blackstone River, the second city in Massachusetts, the heart of the Commonwealth, has a population of about 85,000.
Shut in by its wall of hills, it seemed, as I first came into it, something like a little miniature world in itself. It possesses some share of all the good we know. Nature, that "comely mother," has laid her caressing hand upon it. Art has made many a beautiful structure to adorn its streets. Commerce smiles upon it. While its wonderful manufactures seem to form a great living, throbbing heart for the city. ”

“ On the other hand, others rather encouraged the lad, at least to make the endeavour. Then, for some considerable time before the start was made, the outlook at Malden, so far as Booker Washington was himself personally concerned, had considerably improved. Instead of having to continue at the rough, or even dangerous, labour in which he had been compelled to engage, he obtained a situation in the household of a military officer, whose wife had gained the reputation of being a domestic martinet, the family otherwise being one of the chief in the town. ”

“ When he stopped in the beautiful tourists' camp ground at Omaha, he sat on a big timber, listening to a man who was telling about coming out of San Diego by the Imperial Valley, Yuma, and angling up across Arizona and New Mexico, into the Arkansas River valley.
When Tom Malden had rolled more than two thousand miles and saw the Rockies rising before him, he saw the sage and alkali stretching into the limitlessness of piedmontaine prairies. He had listened to a score of tourists who had made the transcontinental; the desert was often on their lips. ”

“ The gentleman from Alabama (Judge Hopkins) , has hinted to us that the Southern States may find it necessary to protect themselves against this action of Massachusetts, by legislation that shall touch her material interests. Threats of that kind, sir, have no terrors for Massachusetts. Her people will laugh to scorn all such idle threats, by whomsoever made. Massachusetts, with one million of intelligent people, with free schools, free churches, free labor, is competent to take care of her own material interests. ”

“ Whenever human rights needed an advocate, the voice of Massachusetts resounded through the land. Whenever the cause education, enlightment, progress and virtue wanted a champion, Massachusetts pressed to the front. Everywhere within the vast bounderies of this great republic Massachusetts has planted colonies of her intelligence and learning. Whatever there can be in the past achievements to inspire a noble ambition, your State possesses it all. No people can have better reason to respect themselves than the people of this Commonwealth. ”

“ My birthplace grows unfamiliar when I take down an atlas and run my finger over the parti-colored divisions of the Norfolk County of Massachusetts and trace the perimeter which confines Bellingham to its oblong precinct, surrounded by those mythical lands of Mendon, Milford and Medway. They wear an authoritative appearance on the map; but for me they occupied no such positions in my childhood and stand as stubborn realities hindering my feet when I wish to return to the Red House of my fathers. Once there, memory and fact are no longer conflicting. ”

“ Maldon claims to be the oldest borough in Essex, and to have a history, if rather a dull one. Up to the time of the last Reform Bill it returned two members, and as a matter of fact, the candidate who bribed most freely was the winning man. p. 64Now-a-days it is only at an election that the passions of the people are aroused. There is a rector who preaches in an ancient church, there is a Congregational chapel, which I am told is in a flourishing condition; there are Baptists and Wesleyans, and all work together pleasantly excepting when an election ensues. ”

“ Then he ordered a box of gold dust from the Yellow Jacket and stole down to the Cove again and again, till discovered by Job.
In all those years of living for himself and to himself, Andrew Malden had tried to be square with the world. Business was business with him. He made no concessions to any man; pity and altruism were not in his vocabulary. Unconsciously to himself, he had grown to be a very hard man, and the heart within him found it difficult to make itself felt through the calloused surface of his life. But with it all Andrew Malden had been honest. ”

“ I thank God, sir, Massachusetts is not dishonored by such laws! In Massachusetts we have about seven thousand colored people. They have the same rights that we have; they go to our free schools, they enter all the business and professional relations of life, they vote in our elections, and in intelligence and character are scarcely inferior to the citizens of this proud and peerless race whose superiority we have heard so vauntingly proclaimed to-night by the senators from Tennessee and Indiana. ”

“ A desert hobo came into his camp just out of Amboy, in the Mohave, and when he told this man his story the grizzled old fellow wiped a gyp-cut hand across a sun-withered face.
"My boy," he said, "I'm not your father—but I'm—I'm somebody's father. Probably my children feel about me the way you do—and no man's a right to make his flesh and blood think so—worry so—and they can thank you. I'm going home!"
Tom Malden ransacked the deserts till he had seen a thousand valleys. He knew that any day he might find his father. But he might search for ten years and not have that good fortune. ”

“ Still they came from Mormon Bar and Wawona—the greatest throng in the history of Grizzly county; men, women, and children in arms—all to see Job Malden tried for his life.
Through this crowd, Andrew Malden, leaning on his cane, passed in at the great door by Tony's side. The crowd was silent as he passed. Some muttered under their breath; some lifted their hats. That worn, gaunt face startled them all. It was through this same crowd that Tom Reed, with darkened brow, and Dan Dean, limping on his crutches, passed in together. ”

“ Under the Massachusetts law they must stay in the mills and add to the Baldwin millions, while he ‘runs the town.’ Southerners say the black man is not fit to run the State. Baldwin of Massachusetts says his white mill-hands are not fit to run the Town. And he has Massachusetts law with him. ‘People [106] who live in glass houses should not throw stones.’”
For weeks David Baldwin was the recipient of more unfriendly criticism than any other public man in Washington. ”

“ This density gives her 221.78 persons to a square mile, a far greater ratio than any state except Rhode Island. This neighborly proximity has its social tendencies, which may account in part for the hospitable amenities which are a rightful part of Massachusetts' well known loyalty to a higher regard for the purest type of home, a comparative statement of the density of population of a few states.
As inseparable as night is from day, so also are the ills of life from life itself. Massachusetts is no exception to the inexorable law which defines the conditions [pg 445] of human society ”

“ Among the old houses there are none so full of interest as those which have been carefully preserved in the same family, handed down from generation to generation. Over the threshold of these homes have passed men and women whose names are linked irretrievably with important events in our nation's history.
In the early history of our country, few seaport towns stand out in bolder relief than Salem, Massachusetts, a city noted at the commencement of the nineteenth century for her commercial prosperity, and whose ships sailed to every port on the globe. ”

“ What is the value of human life in Congressman Baldwin’s own model town of Papyrus, in the model state of Massachusetts? Congressman Baldwin’s trolley company takes the life of a man earning fifteen hundred dollars a year, and in full payment for that life, it offers the victim’s family three thousand dollars. ”

“ Save in a few localities, there is no longer a rustic population in Massachusetts, and very little distinction between the countryman and the citizen. In small country villages you may find Hiram Beers still, but Tommy Taft, Polly Marble, and Agate Bissell are of a past generation, and even in the past belonged to Connecticut rather than to the Old Bay State. Strangers suppose the people of the several New England States have all the same characteristics, and are cut out and made up after the same pattern ”

“ In Massachusetts we are not the third party. Let our efforts in the next election show us to be FIRST.
First in principles we already are,—first in devotion to those truths which give dignity and security to our common country: let us be FIRST also in numbers and power.
Stand firm, Freemen of Massachusetts! Your fidelity now will be the cement of our new organization, and a token of that mutual confidence which shall assure speedy success. Ours is the cause of truth, of morals, of religion, of God. Let us be united in its support! "A stout heart, a clear conscience, and never despair." ”