304 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



tion. It was not the weakling or the dissolute who faced 

 the dangers of an unknown world for conscience sake. 

 The men who chose this course of life needed no pedigree. 

 As Marshal Lannes said, they were "ancestors, not de- 

 scendants." 



And the nobility of the Old World, in seeking new 

 blood to restore decaying or decayed houses, may look 

 with the same degree of care upon the bank account or 

 rent roll of an American girl, but they ask her in mar- 

 riage with no requirements as to ancestry. 



It was fortunate for the settlement of this republic that 

 the splendid domain of the great Northwest was so far 

 in the interior, so that the barren land of New England 

 could be occupied before the population had seen the fer- 

 tile prairies. 



A young Iowa farmer made his first visit to Massachu- 

 setts a few years ago and wrote back to his father that 

 the soil was so poor that they had to manure it to make 

 brick. This you will no doubt recognize as libelous, or at 

 least an exaggeration, but the fact remains that the New 

 England people turned to the sea, to trade and manu- 

 facture, for their future greatness rather than to the soil. 



Out west we are prone to look upon the New Englander 

 as too much given to science and theory. We commonly 

 imagine the young lady in the schools writing essays on 

 "The philogeny of the hymenoptera," or some equally 

 abstruse question. In fact, we are inclined to yield to 

 them even greater intellectual powers than they claim. 



We recognize the philippics of Demosthenes as hav- 

 ing been equaled by the Wendell Phillipics of forty-five 

 years ago. 



The founding of the great schools of New England 

 were the great factors in giving to that section its dom- 

 inant influence in our history. 



The man who is educated in New England becomes a 



