yes, they were a hard lot; but, nevertheless, they gave us religious
liberty to worship as they required us to worship, and political liberty
to vote as the church required; and so I the bereft one, I the forlorn
one, am here to do my best to help you celebrate them right.
The Quaker woman Elizabeth Hooton was an ancestress of mine. Your people
were pretty severe with her you will confess that. But, poor thing!
I believe they changed her opinions before she died, and took her into
their fold; and so we have every reason to presume that when she died she
went to the same place which your ancestors went to. It is a great pity,
for she was a good woman. Roger Williams was an ancestor of mine.
I don’t really remember what your people did with him. But they banished
him to Rhode Island, anyway. And then, I believe, recognizing that this
was really carrying harshness to an unjustifiable extreme, they took pity
on him and burned him. They were a hard lot! All those Salem witches
were ancestors of mine! Your people made it tropical for them. Yes,
they did; by pressure and the gallows they made such a clean deal with
them that there hasn’t been a witch and hardly a halter in our family
from that day to this, and that is one hundred and eighty-nine years.
The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your
progenitors was an ancestor of mine–for I am of a mixed breed, an
infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. I’m not one of your sham
meerschaums that you can color in a week. No, my complexion is the
patient art of eight generations. Well, in my own time, I had acquired a
lot of my kin–by purchase, and swapping around, and one way and another
–and was getting along very well. Then, with the inborn perversity of
your lineage, you got up a war, and took them all away from me. And so,
again am I bereft, again am I forlorn; no drop of my blood flows in the
veins of any living being who is marketable.
O my friends, hear me and reform! I seek your good, not mine. You have
heard the speeches. Disband these New England societies–nurseries of a
system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if
persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you into
prevaricating and bragging. Oh, stop, stop, while you are still
temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors! Hear me, I beseech
you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock! The Pilgrims were a
simple and ignorant race. They never had seen any good rocks before, or
at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for
hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this
one. But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know
that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing
with rocks, this one isn’t worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five
cents. Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least
throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its
taxes:
Yes, hear your true friend-your only true friend–list to his voice.
Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay–perpetuators of
ancestral superstition. Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I
see the wild and deadly lemonade. These are but steps upon the downward
path. Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee–hotel coffee.
A few more years–all too few, I fear–mark my words, we shall have
cider! Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late. You are on the broad road
which leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and
the gallows! I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious
friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your
impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late. Disband these New
England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from
varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors–the
super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of