New Englander

“ As the New England characteristics are gradually superseded by those of other races, other forms of belief, and other associations, the time may come when a New Englander will feel more as if he were among his own people in London than in one of our seaboard cities. The vast majority of our people love their country too well and are too proud of it to be willing to expatriate themselves. ”

“ The solution of this apparent discord is simply this: that a New Englander considers everybody else's business his business. [Loud laughter.] Now these two essential notions of wishing to live elsewhere, and regarding everybody else's business as our business, furnish the explanation of the processes by which this Republic has come to be what it is—great in every form of power, of strength, of wealth. This dissemination of New England men, and this permeation through other people's business—of our control of it—have made the nation what it is. [Applause.] ”

“ The New Englander is so constantly engaged in creating changes that in his eyes even variety appears monotonous. When a German subject finds himself oppressed by his Government he emigrates; when a French citizen is oppressed he makes the Government emigrate; when Americans find a portion of their Government trying to emigrate they arm themselves and spend four years in going after it and bringing it back. [Laughter and applause.]
You will find the sons of New England everywhere throughout the world, and they are always at the fore. ”

“ But the people out here, although rather despising the close, saving habits of the average New Englander, yet do respect the perseverance, the tenacity, the sort of bull-dog grip that they think the inhabitants of the Eastern States are noted for. They pity the farmers of New England who contend against a stony, barren soil, but they regard with admiration their constant endeavors to obtain a competency. ”

“ It appears your New Englander is very proud of his English descent from good blood, and it is one of their isms in the Yankee States that they are the salt of the British people and the true aristocracy of blood and family, whereas we in the isles retain but a paltry share of the blue blood defiled by incessant infiltrations of the muddy fluid of the outer world. ”

“ But wherever the New-Englander travels among the sturdy commonwealths which have sprung from the seed of the Mayflower, churches, schools, colleges, tell him where the men of his race have been, or their influence penetrated; and an intelligent freedom is the monument of conquests whose results are not to be measured in square miles. ”

“ The New England city is the New Englander's special possession as a market. Farm labor conditions are much the same. In fact, there is hardly a portion of our country, of the same area, which in all these respects yields itself more completely to the idea of unity. ”

“ Although nothing could be printed except propaganda in favor of the provisional government, the increasing discontent of many in all classes made itself heard, both in the colony and in England.
Despite all that has been written of the town-meeting, and the general impression that the average New Englander was almost solely a political and religious animal, there is little evidence to prove that the ordinary man in that section cared any more about government than the ordinary man in Virginia or Maryland. ”

“ The New Englander is attached to his township, not only because he was born in it, but because it constitutes a strong and free social body of which he is a member, and whose government claims and deserves the exercise of his sagacity. ”

“ The main qualities which distinguish the typical New-Englander, though not altogether the most attractive, are nevertheless not the meanest in human nature, and we candidly confess, though not a drop of Puritan blood runs in our veins, that we have but few dislikes, while we entertain many feelings of sincere respect, for the New England type of man. ”

“ It is the normal condition in New England. The New-Englander is a person who is always just about to be warm and comfortable. This is the stuff of which heroes and martyrs are made. A person thoroughly heated or frozen is good for nothing. Look at the Bongos. Examine (on the map) the Dog-Rib nation. The New-Englander, by incessant activity, hopes to get warm. Edwards made his theology. Thank God, New England is not in Paris!
Hudson's Bay, Labrador, Grinnell's Land, a whole zone of ice and walruses, make it unpleasant for New England. ”

“ The planters of New England were men of whom their descendants need not be ashamed. So far as the pride of ancestry may be lawfully indulged, New Englanders, of the present race, may indulge it to the full, in view of the character and deeds of their forefathers. They were inferior men in no sense of the word, however apt we may be to connect the idea of adventurers with that of a roving, restless, dissipated, loose-living class of men, loving savage nature, or freedom from the restraints of civilized life. ”

“ That New Englanders in the past have been and even now are provincial, is the indictment of Europeans and of some Americans. That they have developed reason at the expense of imagination, utility at the expense of beauty, is also affirmed. Their Puritan ancestors are the butt of the ridicule of the caricaturist, of ultra-Liberal preachers and devotees of materialistic science, and of those who have never read history, European or American. No less an authority than Matthew Arnold has described the life of New England as “uninteresting.” ”

“ Such environment, such healthy conditions, produce the character of Americans that the country needs, and the practical benefit from the New Englander reared in such communities is impressed upon all sections of this great land. ”

“ But if in a certain pitilessness of character the New Englanders are more English than the English, they still resemble the Puritans of the seventeenth century in their love of a well-ordered life. It was in their towns and villages that the old colonial life flourished to the wisest purpose. ”

“ Her waking mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast, and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood. ”

“ A New-Englander of culture and sensibility, naturalized at the South, is supposed to communicate the results of his study and observation of that outcast race which has been the easy contempt of ignorance in both sections of the country. ”

“ What a scattering there would be in a New England village, in which one tenth of the inhabitants should die in six weeks of some local disease! Yet these men are New Englanders, only tempered to steel by hardships, by discipline, by a profound sense of duty. ”

“ The southwest is a magazine of atmospheric disasters. Low pressure may be no worse than the others: it is better known, and is most used to inspire terror. It can be summoned any time also from the everglades of Florida, from the morasses of the Okeechobee.
When the New-Englander sees this in his news paper, he knows what it means. ”

“ There was as great a variety in social and economic organisation as in religious beliefs between the aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the democratic agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only was there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None, indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New Englanders. ”

“ It is rather interesting to find that their contemporaries of the Revolutionary period did not share that high estimation of the New Englanders which they themselves clung to so tenaciously and have writ so large in our history that the tradition of New England's unselfish wonder-working in that olden time has never perished. ”

“ There has been an idea that some part of the active, spreading and increasing influence of the New England people as they moved about the world, was from a meddlesome disposition to interfere with other people. There is nothing in that. If there ever was a race that confined itself strictly to minding its own business, it is the New Englanders ”

“ Moreover, being shrewd as well as a man of high principles and a lover of learning for its own sake, the New Englander is convinced that it pays to be educated, and to have educated neighbors and children. His reasoning takes this form: The more children in the schools, the fewer youths and adults in the jails and poorhouses. The better informed the mill operatives, the{23} larger the output of the mills. The higher the standard of living, the larger the demand for the product of the soil and the loom, and the better the home market. ”

“ In the blue haze of that incense in honor of the colonial New Englanders, lighted by themselves and tended by their descendants, we are apt, a little absurdly sometimes, to lose sight of coarse fundamentals. The average man or boy in the New England of this period probably looked upon the theory that the main end of the colony's existence was to make the world safe for the Congregational church, in very much the same way in which those of us who happened to be in France lately found that the average “doughboy” regarded his main end there to be making the world safe for democracy. ”

“ Blindness of the New Englanders as Regards the West.
In the northeastern States, and in New England especially, this feeling showed itself for two generations after the close of the Revolutionary War. On the whole the New Englanders have exerted a more profound and wholesome influence upon the development of our common country than has ever been exerted by any other equally numerous body of our people. They have led the nation in the path of civil liberty and sound governmental administration. ”

“ The characteristics of the Dutch of New Netherland were so indelibly stamped, that, after a lapse of more than two centuries, they are still marked features of New York society.
Saucy New England underwent fewer changes by reason of the restoration than all the other colonies. The New Englanders were men and women of iron who dared everything. They were always cool, cautions, yet bold, and when they made an effort to gain a right, they always won. They clung to all their rights and demanded more. ”

“ Nothing that was edible and transportable was safe from the predatory hands of the men and boys who, a very few months before, had been conspicuous in their own localities for their sterling honesty and straightforwardness. War and so-called necessity worked wonderful transformations in these well reared New Englanders. If all the stories that have been told in subsequent years may be believed, the marvel is that the natives had anything left to subsist upon. ”

“ It has left its impress upon the minds of their children's children down to our own time, and has affected the opinions held about them by other people. It has had something to do with a certain tacit assumption of superiority on the part of New Englanders, upon which the men and women of other communities have been heard to comment in resentful and carping tones. ”

“ It was usual, in an earlier and less critical day, to trace all of New England's greatness, and of her noble contributions to our common American life, to the same little group of leaders, who were supposed to have done all because they did much. Life is not so simple as that, and in the founding of New England, and the development of her liberties, we must find place for English kings and statesmen, for colonial liberals and martyrs, as well as for Pilgrim Father and Puritan Priest. ”

“ The English company wanted a successful settlement, one to which they could themselves retreat if political and ecclesiastical oppression in the old country should prove too great for their endurance; and they well knew that prosperity depended upon order, sobriety, thrift, and piety. The splendid history and the moral leadership of New England in these three centuries have justified this painstaking, minute, even exasperating watch over the welfare of a colony far from the restraints of an old civilization, in peril from hostile savages and lawless adventurers on an inhospitable soil. ”

“ But beyond all the charters and laws which modern criticism had raked out from buried or forgotten records, there is something in the character of the English yeoman which even better explains what is most noticeable in the settlement of the American Colonies, especially in New England. The restless passion for personal independence, the patience, the energy, the enterprise, even the narrowness and bigotry which marked the English middle classes in all the crises of their history, stand out in bold relief in the character of the New England settlers. ”

“ They are written with a consciousness of the manly virtues, and solid worth, of New England, as she is, and always has been. They simply mark points of difference worked upon men by a change of soil and society—points that should be known, whether approved or condemned. What son of New England does not look back upon her with pride? ”

“ In the other colonies, men may have been more ignorant of books, but they were healthy-minded. In New England, the concentration of an awakened mental life almost wholly upon the problems of election or damnation created a condition of ethical morbidity, and bequeathed to us the legacy of what may almost be called that section’s fourth contribution to American life—the New England conscience, with its pathological questionings and elaborate system of taboos. ”