FRANK O. LOWDEN

ETERNAL VIGILANCE

This speech was delivered in response to the toast "Forefathers' Day" at the dinner of the New England Society of New York, December 22, 1919. Mr. Darwin P. Kingsley, president of the Society, introduced Governor Lowden.

MR. TOASTMASTER, GUESTS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:-Of course, no one lives so far away from New York that he is not familiar with the fame of New England Society dinners. Your toastmaster referred to the fact that measured by bank deposits and mileage, this dinner surpassed any of its predecessors. While I cannot claim to make much of a contribution to the bank deposits, I have made a larger contribution to the mileage of the occasion than anyone else here, I

am sure.

I recall very well that throughout my younger years I used to hear much concerning this annual dinner; in fact, the jests and the repartee and the eloquence that here found expression were repeated generally in the West during the banquet season on all occasions; therefore, I am not unmindful of the significance of this evening. If I had been, its import has been duly emphasized to me. I was told by several wellmeaning friends before I left home that I must make a good speech, and those of you who have had experience in speech making know how greatly that sort of prompting aids one. Then when I got to New York-I arrived over one of those roads that leads from the West here and, being about half nationalized, Governor Cornwell, I was five or six hours late-I went to the hotel and in order that I might have no illusions touching my greatness, the waiter informed me the first thing the ensuing morning that there were four Governors in that hotel the night before. But when I reached this banquet

room sitting here with considerable diffidence and trepidation, I was informed by ex-presidents of this Society of the very long and distinguished array of orators that in the more than one hundred years of its existence had here appeared, and to increase my courage and my good cheer, they related instance after instance of the failure of men who had been successful in other places in making speeches here.

Also, when I was invited, I was informed that the chief places on the program were invariably filled in accordance with precedent by genuine, native New Englanders. Heredity would not avail in this case. I recalled that most of my ancestors for almost three hundred years had been New Englanders and I remembered an incident that happened to me a few years ago. Some one having called my attention to the fact that one of these genealogies, of which you spoke, Mr. Lincoln, had been published of one family down here and that it ended with my name, I looked it up, and I found this was the entry: "Married, Jerusha Loomis to Orren Lowden; gone West." That was the end of that lineage of the Lowden family. It seems to have been the custom that when our fathers or grandfathers left New England for some point beyond the Alleghanies their biography ended with the simple legend, "Gone West," and I wondered if by any possibility this could have been the origin of a very beautiful and pathetic phrase that was employed by the English soldiers during the recent war. You will recall that when one of their brave men had fallen in battle, they did not mention him as being dead, but said, in more poetic terms, that he had "Gone West."

Recently I had the good fortune to pick up a volume written by one of your old Pilgrim Fathers, Governor Bradford, and found it exceedingly interesting. The experiences of those Pioneers and the lessons they learned in the first decade of their existence in the new world are as timely and appropriate to-day as they were then.

I suppose that never in the history of the world has a small community, covering as limited an area, made so powerful an impress upon the history of a great country as this little band of Pilgrim Fathers. Governor Bradford says: "The experience that was had in this common course-" because, bound

together as they were by common dangers and a common religion, all the conditions were absolutely suited to community life, if they ever are. It was indeed an ideal little socialistic state, which for the first few years our Pilgrim Fathers had, but after four years, according to Governor Bradford, they reached this conclusion:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos and other ancients, applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of propertie, and bringing in communitie into a comone wealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

That lesson was learned by the Pilgrim Fathers within four brief years, and yet there are to-day, I regret to say, in many of our universities and, alas, sometimes in our pulpits, in addition to the orators of whom Governor Cornwell so eloquently spoke, those who repudiate that experience of the Pilgrim Fathers and who would again restore the condition which they learned to abandon in four brief years. I commend these words of Governor Bradford to those proponents of an ideal state who would repudiate all the teachings of history and all experience of mankind.

To-day there are many hundreds of thousands of our citizens who believe that victuals and clothes should be divided equally among all without reference to the contribution that individuals make to the common weal. I know of no other book containing so much wisdom applicable to present-day conditions as this old narrative of Governor Bradford descriptive of the first few years of Plymouth Colony. At the risk of wearying you, I am going to read again:

The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labours and victails, cloaths, etc., with the meaner and yonger sorte, thought it some indignite and disrespect unto them.

A little bit farther in the volume Governor Bradford says:

For this communite was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment that would have been to their benefite and comforte.

I wish I could give you the spelling. It is very unique and

perhaps it is the spelling that is still practiced in New England. I sometimes think so when I get letters from my youngest daughter who is in a New England school at the present time.

"For the yong-men" y-o-n-g for young-"that were not able and fitte for labour and service”—that is, for heavy, regular work-"did repine that they should spend their time and streingth to worke for other mens wives and children, without any recompence. And for mens wives to be commanded to doe service for other men, as dressing their meats, washing their cloaths, etc., they deemed it a kind of slaverie, neither could many husbands well brooke it."

That is what they found in this idealistic community life which they practiced during their first years on Plymouth Rock. I feel certain that Lenine and Trotsky are not familiar with this historic work and it probably was not the experiences of the Pilgrim Fathers during those few years which induced these great statesmen of the present era to attempt to nationalize women, but if they had read this book they would have learned that a communistic form of life is impossible where there exists the institution of the family and the home. There is further wisdom demonstrated by Governor Bradford in this remarkable volume, because he says:

The strong, or man of parts, had no more in devission of victails and cloaths, than he that was weake and not able to doe a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice.

There were, no doubt, in this group of men some of greater ability than others, some with qualities of leadership, some who planned the general enterprise for all, and these leaders had no inducement to exercise those faculties; therefore, all suffered from a condition which will return the moment that the effort to reproduce this sort of communistic life attains fruition.

There are many lessons besides these that we can learn from the Pilgrim Fathers. At times we misinterpret what they taught. A few years ago I recall that the town meeting, so celebrated by the historian and statesman, was assumed to be a reason for legislation providing for the initiative, referendum and recall. It was supposed for a time that this trinity

afforded a town meeting on a larger scale and New England was used as an argument for those so-called reforms. The fact is, that even forty years after the colony was established at Plymouth Rock and as soon as the community became sufficiently large so that all the people could not meet conveniently at the same time and in the same room, they provided for the election of delegates from the outstanding communities, thus establishing the principle of representative government as contradistinguished from pure democracy, and in my opinion if our government is permanently to endure, it must be as a representative government precisely as the Pilgrim Fathers discovered a necessity for it almost three hundred years ago. But I believe the greatest contribution that they made to our institutions was the practical capacity for the development of self-government. As was mentioned in the very interesting address of your president, the New England colonies did not look for help or sustenance from England. In this respect they differed radically from the colony at Jamestown. They struck out for themselves; they never acknowledged a very close tie binding them to the home country and a good part of the time, as I read history, they were in open insurrection against the British flag.

But they did learn how to govern themselves, and whenever they advanced, as they did, to some newer frontier, government evolved as naturally as the sparks flew upward from their camp fires, and from that day until the present, this spirit has influenced, aye, it has saved America, as I believe. So the state became possible and the state became capable of self-government, and there isn't anything that has happened within the last year that has afforded me such profound satisfaction as to know that old Massachusetts still, under the leadership of Calvin Coolidge, possesses the ability and, therefore, the right to rule itself.

But I see evidences everywhere of this capacity for selfgovernment breaking down. It is one of the ominous signs. of the times, and business men are in part at least responsible for this condition. In the old days in New England the men of a town did not call for outside aid when trouble came but met that trouble with their own strong right arms. To-day,