O my friends, hear me and reform!  I seek your good, not mine.  You have heard the speeches.  Disband these New England societies—­nurseries of a system of steadily augmenting laudation and hosannaing, which; if persisted in uncurbed, may some day in the remote future beguile you into prevaricating and bragging.  Oh, stop, stop, while you are still temperate in your appreciation of your ancestors!  Hear me, I beseech you; get up an auction and sell Plymouth Rock!  The Pilgrims were a simple and ignorant race.  They never had seen any good rocks before, or at least any that were not watched, and so they were excusable for hopping ashore in frantic delight and clapping an iron fence around this one.  But you, gentlemen, are educated; you are enlightened; you know that in the rich land of your nativity, opulent New England, overflowing with rocks, this one isn’t worth, at the outside, more than thirty-five cents.  Therefore, sell it, before it is injured by exposure, or at least throw it open to the patent-medicine advertisements, and let it earn its taxes: 

Yes, hear your true friend-your only true friend—­list to his voice.  Disband these societies, hotbeds of vice, of moral decay—­perpetuators of ancestral superstition.  Here on this board I see water, I see milk, I see the wild and deadly lemonade.  These are but steps upon the downward path.  Next we shall see tea, then chocolate, then coffee—­hotel coffee.  A few more years—­all too few, I fear—­mark my words, we shall have cider!  Gentlemen, pause ere it be too late.  You are on the broad road which leads to dissipation, physical ruin, moral decay, gory crime and the gallows!  I beseech you, I implore you, in the name of your anxious friends, in the name of your suffering families, in the name of your impending widows and orphans, stop ere it be too late.  Disband these New England societies, renounce these soul-blistering saturnalia, cease from varnishing the rusty reputations of your long-vanished ancestors—­the super-high-moral old iron-clads of Cape Cod, the pious buccaneers of Plymouth Rock—­go home, and try to learn to behave!

However, chaff and nonsense aside, I think I honor and appreciate your Pilgrim stock as much as you do yourselves, perhaps; and I endorse and adopt a sentiment uttered by a grandfather of mine once—­a man of sturdy opinions, of sincere make of mind, and not given to flattery.  He said:  “People may talk as they like about that Pilgrim stock, but, after all’s said and done, it would be pretty hard to improve on those people; and, as for me, I don’t mind coming out flatfooted and saying there ain’t any way to improve on them—­except having them born in, Missouri!”

COMPLIMENTS AND DEGREES

          Deliveredat the lotos club, January 11, 1908