The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-12-23
SENATOR H0AR'S ADDRESS
BEFORE ANNUAL FESTIVIL OF NEV
 ENGLAND SOCIETY.


 the Most Precious on Earth-How It Was Obtained From the English Gov ernment-Mr. Bllyard's Part in It.
 New York, Dec. 22-The ninety-sac- ond annual festival of the New Eng land society In the city of New York was held at Delmonico's tonight. Four hundred members of the society and their friends, including many distin- guished men, were present, among them J. Pierpont Morgan, Charles Jaes, James Massey, William Ryall West, James Whitcomb Riley, Hon. Richard Olney, Hon. Edward o. Wolcott, Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott, Governor Frank s, Black, President c. Beaman, Hon. George F. Hoar, President Elcott, George Edmunds, General Nelson A. Miles, Mayor Strong, Frederick J. De Peyster, Morgan J. O'Brien Franklin Stanton, Isaac Bailey, Horace Russell and John w. Vrooman. Senator Hoar delivered the address of the evening, as follows:
 have been asked good many times, in years gone by, to attend these din- ners and those of your kindred society in Brooklyn. I have always had good honest reasons, growing out of public duties, why I should not accept. But, after all, I think the controlling reason was this: I account myself the worst after-dinner speaker on this continent. Now, it is great honor and distinction to be invited to dinner of this society. When I declined the invitation, had the honor; indeed, it was quite likely that it would be repeated; and at the same time I got off without being de- tected. But this year the sweet and in nocent lures of MT. Beaman have caught the wary bird, and I suppose I shall never be invited to dine with the New England society again.
 The president asks me to say some- thing about the return of the Bradford manuscript. There is little to be said that you do not already know. The Bradford manuscript has been placed, by order of Governor Wolcott, the lin- cal and most worthy successor of Will liam Bradford, in the archives of the state house at Boston, there to abide until the children of the Pilgrims are unworthy to keep 1t; or, what l hope and believe to be the same thing, until time shall be no more.
 It is the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover the text of one of the gospels as written by the pen of the evangelist. do not think of any other single object of human possession so precious to the children of New England, or, unless possibly we were to except a very few of the great paintings and statutes, to the world. The story of the successful attempt to get 1t back, after many failures, is, I suppose, familiar to all of the gentle men who sit about this table. We were fortunate that MT. Bayard, the repre- sentative not so much of the diplomacy as of the good will of the American people at the court of St. James, hap pened then to be in London and to con- tribute his great influence to the result. After all, our gratitude is chiefly due o'the two illustrious prelates, Bishop Temple, now archbishop of Canterbury, and his successor of London, the pres ent Bishop Creighton. If we want any better testimony that the spirit of the Pilgrims has become for us the spirit of the age and is now pervading the English-speaking world. it is to be found in the fact that while John Mill ton said that our Pilgrim Fathers filed from the fury of the bishops" this great act of international kindness has been accomplished by the successor of Arch bishop Laud and the successor of Bon- ner and Bancroft.
 The society tonight celebrates the memory of the Pilgrims on the anniver- sary of the day when they came ashore at Plymouth. We are not, at this mo- ment, doing honor to Puritanism. We will stand by, we will defend against any antagonist, on any fitting occasion the name and fame of our Puritan fore fathers-planters of states, builders of constitutions, creators and preservers of English freedom; who found the English house of commons the feeble and timid instrument of despotism, lit tie more than the register of the kings command, and left it the main deposi- tory of the national dignity and the na- tional will--the strongest, freest, most venerable legislative body the world had ever seen; who brought to the bar and the block, king and minister, and prelate who stood in their way; who in oue CEOWuCo Hdll CSIiLuIS louuoSu -NGW England in one hemisphere, and made the great name of the old England ter rible by sea and land on the other.
 But we are thinking tonight of the Pilgrim, the consummate flower, the sweet and gentle and fragrant-Mayflow- CT of history. He is as different from the Puritan as a Hebrew prophet from St. John It is not unnatural or un- common to find such diversities among men of the same nation, or of the same generation, or of the same faith. In- deed we do not always remember how many men, near kindred in the spirit of our Pilgrim Fathers, even in that generation of bigotry and persecution, the left behind them in the Church of England. The difference between John Endicott and Nathaniel Ward and Cot ton Mather, on one side, and William Bradford and John Robinson or Roger Williams. on the other, is not greater than that which separates Laud and Bapcroft and Bonner from Jeremy Tay- Tor and Henry Vaughn and George Her bert and his friends whose lives Isaac Walton wrote, where
 with moistened eye
 We read of faith and purest charity,