Of course, the thoroughgoing admiration of New England people, and especially of Bostonians, for all that is New England, and, above all, all that is Boston, has been well recognized for a long while and has not failed of proper appreciation, to some degree at least, even in New England itself. To Oliver Wendell Holmes we owe that delightful characterization of it in the "Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," "Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. You could not pry that out of a Boston man (and _a fortiori_ I think it may be said out of a Boston woman) if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar." James Russell Lowell expressed the same idea very forcibly in other words in some expressions of his essay on "A Certain Condescension in Foreigners," that have been perhaps oftenest quoted and are dear to every true New Englander's heart. Of course, he meant it a great deal more than half in jest, but who of us who know our Down Easterners doubt that most of them take it considerably more than half in earnest? Their attitude shows us very well how much the daughter New England was ready to take after mother England in {435} the matter of thinking so much of herself that she must perforce be condescending to others. Lowell's expression is worthy to be placed beside that of Oliver Wendell Holmes for the guidance of American minds. They are keys to the situation. "I know one person," said Lowell, "who is singular enough to think Cambridge (Mass.) the very best spot on the habitable globe. 'Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless he never did.'" It only needed his next sentence fully to complete the significance of Boston and its academic suburb in the eyes of every good Bostonian. "The full tide of human existence may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross and in a larger sense." Of course there is no insuperable objection to allowing New Englanders to add to the gayety of nations in this supreme occupation with themselves, and we would gladly suffer them if only they would not intrude their New Englandism on some of the most important concerns of the nation. But that is impossible, for New Englandism is most obtrusive. It is New England that has written most of the history of this country and its influence has been paramount on most of our education. It has supplied most of the writers of history and moulded most of the school-teachers of the country. The consequence has been a stamping of New Englandism all over our history and on the minds of rising generations for the better part of a century, with a {436} perversion of the realities of history in favor of New England that is quite startling when attention is particularly directed to it.