The production and distribution of food and fuel have been advanced.  The maintenance of industrial peace has been promoted.  The Gloucester fishermen, fifteen thousand shoemakers in Lynn, the Boston & Maine railroad employees, have had their differences adjusted.  A second million dollars for emergency expenses has been given the Governor and Council.  An efficient State Guard of over ten thousand men has been organized.  Our brave soldiers, their dependents, the great patriotic public have been protected by the present Government with every means that ingenuity could devise.  We have won the right to reelection by duty well performed.

Remember this:  we are not responsible for the war, we are responsible for the preparation that enables us to defend our soldiers and ourselves from savages.  Massachusetts is not going to repudiate these patriotic services.  To do so now would mean more than repudiating the Government.  It would mean repudiating the devotion of our brave men in arms, repudiating the sacrifice of the fathers, mothers, wives, and dear ones behind, and repudiating the loyalty of the millions who subscribed to the Liberty Loan,—­it would mean repudiating America.

Massachusetts has decided that the path of the Mayflower shall not be closed.  She has decided to sail the seas.  She has decided to sail not under the edict of Potsdam, crimped in narrow lanes seeking safety in unarmed merchantmen painted in fantastic hues, as the badge of an infamous servitude, but she has decided to sail under the ancient Declaration of Independence, choosing what course she will, maintaining security by the guns of ships of the line, flying at the mast the Stars and Stripes, forever the emblem of a militant liberty.

XIV

DEDICATION OF TOWN-HOUSE, WESTON

NOVEMBER 27, 1917

I was interested to come out here and take part in the dedication of this beautiful building in part because my ancestors had lived in this locality in times gone past, but more especially because I am interested in the town governments of Massachusetts.  You have heard the town-meeting referred to this evening.  It seemed to me that the towns in this Commonwealth correspond in part to what we might call the water-tight compartments of the ship of state, and while sometimes our State Government has wavered, sometimes it has been suspended, and it has been thought that the people could not care for themselves under those conditions.  Whenever that has arisen the towns of the Commonwealth have come to the rescue and been able to furnish the foundation and the strength on which might not only be carried on, but on which might again be erected the failing government of the Commonwealth or the failing government of the Nation.  So that I know nothing to which we New Englanders owe more, and especially the people of Massachusetts, of our civil liberties than we do to our form of town government.