"when he began to be about thirty years of age,' and places him where he proves to be the first educator of his time? Remember that, ye boards of appointment who have to deal with the nominations of men who are to serve the world "when they began to be about thirty years of age." What Garfield said of Mark Hopkins could have been said of this leader of half a century, that you could make a university if you put Francis Wayland at "one end of a pine slab and his pupil at the other."

Nor let me forget Washington's great second. I asked Jared Sparks once what would have happened if Washington had been killed in any of the fighting around Philadelphia, in 1777, in the Revolution. Sparks said to me that if Nathanael Greene could have taken his place, all would have been well; that Greene was fit to discharge every duty which Washington discharged. And I think Sparks said that Washington knew this. You know the state of Georgia gave Greene a plantation because he rescued it. And it will not hurt you to remember that on

that plantation Eli Whitney invented the cottongin and so changed the history of the world.

And when you come to spend your six months in Rhode Island, do not forget to find out Greenwich, which was the home of the Greenes, and spend a night, if you please, at the "Bunch of Grapes." Or go down, if you please, to hear the boys recite their Virgil in Greenwich Academy. And for one more person in Rhode Island, let me remind you of the charming story of John Carter Brown, the millionaire who was willing to be linked with the despised and rejected John Brown of Harper's Ferry.

CHAPTER VII

CONNECTICUT

EVERY political advance, every sane constitution of government, every crisis, and every step taken for human freedom goes to the maintenance of happy homes. This is George Frisbie

Hoar's central statement. For us,

the laws of Alfred, Magna Charta, the fight at Naseby, the Bill of

Rights, the Declaration of Independence, Constitutional Govern

ment the Union of States, all

have meant that men should have Happy Homes. Connecticut has perhaps worked her name into history as the state which is most successful in this business. Compare Switzerland with her in that line, if you choose. Compare Vermont. But Connecticut is older than Vermont, and her history from the beginning has been the history

of groups of men who came together in different places, and lived together, and made laws, each community for itself, simply that they might have happy homes - Home Rule. You see, they

CAPTAIN WADSWORTH CONCEALING THE CHARTER OF CONNECTICUT.

have as yet no piling up of people in prison cells called "apartments," nor crowding together in barracks called "tenements"-or they have not many such. I have heard a man say that in their largest city in New Haven or in Hartford man can get more out of life than he can in any other city in the world. I am not sure but this is true.

а

The "land of steady habits," people used to say; and before they said that they used to make up absurd codes and say that they were the "Blue Laws of Connecticut." These "Blue Law" codes, as they were printed, were fictions; but the fiction itself implies what is true that in the making of laws in their little assemblies these people always had the fundamental idea of Right. It was not for expediency, it was not for profit, but it was to fulfil the law of the Living God, that the first generation legislated. Well, from such a little state as that large things have followed. The Western Reserve in Ohio was a new Connecticut, where the land was fertile and the winters were not cold, where every seed would bear fruit an hundred fold. And Connecticut may well claim the credit for what the Western Reserve has done: in our own time, for Giddings and Hayes and Garfield and Grant, I must not say, for the Church of Latter-Day Saints, which I suppose the Western Reserve perhaps would be glad to forget. Mr. Calhoun once said that he remembered a session of the