The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-06-14

| ing proudly her future, we're as cheerful
| sight TO see as the sun looked upon. Derry,
| sitting among the grey rocks, in wise sim
| plicity and calling back TO her thronging de-
| scendants, found among them citizens of half
| the States of the Union Senators, Judges.
men of SCIENCE divines, college profes-
| sors, editors, poets, travellers, women of
fashion and fame. Together they re-
called the days when a handful of the
sturdy Scotch-Irish, sixteen families in all,
penetrated unknown woods raised their for
lorn cabins, defed frost and starvation, estab-
l1shed school and church, and by-and-by
named the hamlet in memory of the heroism
of their fathers in Ireland forty years before.
Together they revived with exultation the ex-
ploits of Derry men in King Williams war. in
the Colonial war; and, not without tears re-
membered their part in the war for Union.
Together they celebrated the peaceful avoca-
tons OF their generation, and proved that
thrift, and skill, and ingenuity and wit have
been the constant inheritance of the blood.
And, parting, these eight thousand people
went away with kinder hearts toward the old
home and each other, and deeper respect
for the impelling convictions that founded
that home.
Such festivals have fine Significance
New England is bounded now by the Pacific on
the West as by the Atlantic on the East
Wherever a New England man carries New
England ideas, she plants a colony. Her
sterile hill lots have broadened into fertile
prairies; her narrow rivers stream to the Gulf
and the Western Ocean; her slow-increasing
villages turn cities in a night. In the whirl
and rush of affairs, in the heaping up of
wealth, and the absorption of immense and
complex interests, in a migratory life, chang
ing from city to city and from house to
house, and in the contact with all nation
alltles, the sentiment of home-loving and
housekeeping gets somewhat dulled, the dis
tinctive characteristics of American civiliza-
ton are somewhat worn away, and the old
years and the old friends and the
old influences are somewhat forgotten.
New York is fattered at being
called the New Paris; Chicago is
pleased with being ikened to New York;
Omaha and Denver emulate Chicago And
this is not through feeling of kinship, but
OF rivalry 1t is a mad race for wealth and
the things of wealth. Now New York ought
not to be second Paris, or a second any
thing. None but herself should be her
parallel. She should develop a new and larger
civilization, because her conditions are new
and large. The artificial fneness of the Old
World does not belong to her. Nor should
Chicago repeat New York The life that is
in her should express her. And Omaha and
Denver doubtless have an individuality of
their own which is better than anything they
can borrow The cities will come to this
direct and honest expression as their citizens
come to live their own lives And no help to
this good end is more potent than standing
within the influence of lives that were direct
and honest.
Frenchmen and Englishmen, heirs of ages
Of magnificent national existence and enor-
nous national wealth, kindle their patriotism
and cement their brotherhood with the con-
temptation of their wonderful conquests. The
heirs of two centuries of struggling for civil
and religious liberty; heirs of hardship over
come and poverty cheerfully borne: heirs of
grand political ideas nursed by that very
hardship and poverty, must kindle our patri-
otism and cement our brotherhood by the
contemplation and remembrance of these in
heritances. When the homely old New Eng
land places call us back to the fourth and fifth
generation, it will be well to go with eager
ness. Perhaps the very name of the messy
town has a hint of heroism, like this London
derry. At least the tie of close kinship of
common blood will warm our hearts, and
make us sensitive to the influences of the
time. And these influences will be a generous
friendship, which will forget all boundaries of
States; fresh remembrance of valor, and
unselfshness, and simplicity; a fresh desire
to live our broader lives as nobly as they
whose names we bear lived their narrow ones
SO many years ago; an impulse to carry back
into the daily existence from which we came
genuineness that it had somewhat lacked; a
conviction that we, too, have received the
high commission to leave the world better
than we found it, Every mothers birthday
feast that is made is a wise festival because it
draws children's hearts nearer together in
rejoicing, and the birthday of venerable
village, whose children are SO many that they
do not know each others faces, must be best
of all.