Why does the world minify our intelligence by depreciating our favorite article of diet, and express the ultimate extreme of mental pauperism by saying of him on whose intellect they would heap contempt, "He doesn't know beans"? [Laughter.] And it is within my recollection that there was a time when it was proposed to reconstruct the Union of the States, with New England left out. Why, I repeat it, the intense unpopularity of New England? For one thing, it seems to me, we are hated because of our virtues; we are ostracized because men are tired of hearing about "New England, the good." The virtues of New England seem to italicize the moral poverty of mankind at large. The fact that the very first act of our foremothers, even before the landing was made, two hundred and sixty-nine years ago, was to go on shore and do up the household linen, which had suffered from the voyage of ninety days, is a perpetual reproof to those nations among whom there is a great opening for soap, who have a great many saints' days, but no washing day. [Laughter and applause.] When men nowadays are disposed to steal a million acres from the Indians, it detracts from their enjoyment to read what Governor Josiah Winslow wrote in _1676_: "I think I can clearly say that, before the present troubles broke out, the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors." When our fellow-citizens of other States look at their public buildings, every stone in which tells of unpaid loans; when they remember how they have scaled and scaled the unfortunate people who were guilty of the crime of having money to lend, until the creditors might be considered obnoxious to the Mosaic law, which looked with disfavor upon scaleless fish, it is naturally aggravating to them to remember that, at the close of King Philip's war, Plymouth Colony was owing a debt more than equal to the personal property of the colony, and that the debt was paid to the last cent [applause]; to remember the time, not very far gone by, when the Bay State paid the interest on her bonds in gold, though it cost her two hundred and seventy-six cents on every dollar to do it, and when it was proposed to commend the bonds of the United States to the bankers of the world by placing upon them the indorsement of Massachusetts [applause]; to remember that never has New England learned to articulate the letters that spell the word "Repudiation." [Great applause.] To those members of the human family who are disposed to entertain too high an estimate of themselves there is something aggravating in the extreme humility and sensitive self-depreciation of the real New Englander.