you our merchant-princes.  Where is the city or village in our State where you do not own the best houses, run the largest manufactories, and control the principal industries?  We have several times made one of your number Governor of the State, and we have placed you in positions where you honor us while we honor you.  New York’s choice in the National Cabinet is the distinguished Secretary of State, whose pure Yankee blood renders him none the less a most fit and most eminent representative of the Empire State.

But while we have done our best to satisfy the Yankee, there is one thing we have never been able to do.  We can meet his ambition and fill his purse, but we never can satisfy his stomach.  When the President stated to-night that Plymouth Rock celebrated this anniversary on the 21st, whilst we here did so on the 22d, he did not state the true reason.  It is not as he said, a dispute about dates.  The pork and beans of Plymouth are insufficient for the cravings of the Yankee appetite, and they chose the 21st, in order that, by the night train, they may get to New York on the 22d, to have once a year a square meal.  From 1620 down to the opening of New York to their settlement, a constantly increasing void was growing inside the Yankee diaphragm, and even now the native and imported Yankee finds the best-appointed restaurant in the world sufficient for his wants; and he has migrated to this house, that he may annually have the sensation of sufficiency in the largest hotel in the United States.

My friend, Mr. Curtis, has eloquently stated, in the beginning of his address, the Dutchman’s idea of the old Puritan.  He has stated, at the close of his address, the modern opinion of the old Puritan.  He was an uncomfortable man to live with, but two hundred years off a grand historic figure.  If any one of you, gentlemen, was compelled to leave this festive board, and go back two hundred years and live with your ancestor of that day, eat his fare, drink his drink, and listen to his talk, what a time would be there, my countrymen!  Before the Puritan was fitted to accomplish the work he did, with all the great opportunities that were in him, it was necessary that he should spend two years in Leyden and learn from the Dutch the important lesson of religious toleration, and the other fundamental lesson, that a common school education lies at the foundation of all civil and religious liberty.  If the Dutchman had conquered Boston, it would have been a misfortune to this land, and to the world.  It would have been like Diedrich Knickerbocker wrestling with an electric battery.