I do not know if Cardinal Gibbons is present; I do not recognize him. If he is, I am pleased to have had the honor to recite in his hearing and to commend to his attention these words, so true, so just, so appreciative, of a distinguished ecclesiastic of his communion; for they were spoken by the late Archbishop Hughes in a public lecture in this city in 1852. [Applause.] I would, however, much rather have recited them in the ears of those Protestant Americans--alas, that there should be born New Englanders among them, that is, such according to the flesh, not according to the spirit--who are wont to betray a strange relish for disparaging both the principles and the conduct of our great sires in that early day when they were sowing in weakness what has ever since been rising with power. There have always, indeed, been those who were fond of spying the blemishes of New England, of illustrating human depravity by instances her sinners contributed. With the open spectacle of armies of beggars--God's beggars they are; I do not object to them--continually swarming in across her borders, as bees to their meadows, and returning not empty, they keep on calling her close-fisted. They even blaspheme her weather--her warm-hearted summers and her magnificent winters. There is, to be sure, a time along in March--but let that pass. [Laughter.] I refer to this without the least irritation. I do not complain of it. On the contrary, I glory in it. I love her for the enemies she has made. [Laughter.] She is the church member among the communities, and must catch it accordingly. It is the saints who are always in the wrong. [Laughter.] Elijah troubled Israel. Daniel was a nuisance in Babylon. And long may New England be such as to make it an object to find fault with her. [Hearty applause.] Such she will be so long as she is true to herself--true to her great traditions; true to the principles of which her life was begotten; so long as her public spirit has supreme regard to the higher ranges of the public interest; so long as in her ancient glorious way she leaves the power of the keys in the hands of the people; so long as her patriotism springs, as in the beginning it sprang, from the consciousness of rights wedded to the consciousness of duties; so long as by her manifold institutions of learning, humanity, religion, thickly sown, multitudinous, universal, she keeps the law of the Forefathers' faith, that "Man lives not by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." [Prolonged applause.] * * * * * THE SOLDIER STAMP [Speech of Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, Conn., at the eighty-sixth annual dinner of the New England Society in the city of New York, December 22, 1891. J. Pierpont Morgan, the President, occupied the chair. Mr. Twichell responded to the toast, "Forefathers' Day."]