New times demand new measures and new men; The old advances and in time outgrows The laws that in our fathers’ day were best. And doubtless after us some purer scheme will be Shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth. My soul is not a palace of the past, Where outworn creeds like Rome’s great Senate quake, Hearing afar the vandals’ trumpet hoarse That shakes old systems with a thunder fit. The time is ripe and rotten ripe for change. [Applause.] Then let it come; I have no dread Of what is called for by the instinct of mankind. [Cries of “Good!”] Friends, that is what Lowell wrote in 1856. It is what we could put on our banners now in 1912. And I appeal to the Massachusetts of Lowell’s time, to the Massachusetts that believed in the Bigelow papers, to the Massachusetts that sent young Lowell and Shaw, that sent Hallowell and so many of your people to the front in the Civil War. I appeal to that Massachusetts to stand loyal now to the memories of Massachusetts’ great past. And now just wait――only two more lines of poetry. One of the curious traits of many of our good friends who are at the moment our opponents is that they are entirely willing to pay heed to the loftiest democratic sentiments if you will only keep them as sentiments and not try to reduce them to prose. EMERSON AND THE PEOPLE. I think I could get every worthy citizen of the Back Bay who at present feels the deepest distrust of us to applaud with tepid decorum [laughter] the following two lines of Emerson, provided only that I merely read them, in the course of a lecture on Emerson, and did not ask to translate them into action. [Laughter and applause.] The lines are: For fishers and choppers and plowmen Shall constitute a State. He is describing the birth of Massachusetts, the birth of the United States, and he describes this country as being foreordained through the ages to show the kings, the aristocracy, the powers of privilege in the Old World, that here in the New World we could have a true and real democracy, a democracy where fishers and choppers and plowmen constitute a State. [Applause and cheers.] As I say, friends, I could get decorous applause in any part of the Back Bay for that sentiment so long as I treated it purely as poetry of the past and not as politics of the present. [Applause.] “THE MOB” WHO RULE.