40 STATE POMOLOaiCAL SOCIETY. 



found men from Maine leading in many of the enterprises. It is a 

 want of love for their father-laud ; a want of patriotism ; an indis- 

 position to make their native State their home and to assist in its 

 elevation, and the too extensive prevalence of the impression that 

 the State makes the man and not the man the State. 



A wrong idea has been attached to the oft-repeated apothegm 

 of the Great Author of Christianity, that a prophet hath not honor 

 in his own country. As if every man were a prophet. It is a 

 very difficult thing to believe that a person whom we have known 

 all our lives is endowed with supernatural gifts, and we hold him 

 in no honor when he exhibits them — call him a- humbug, and refuse 

 to credit it. But when a man grows up among us and does well 

 what man is known to be capable of doing, who is industrious, 

 attends to his own business and makes progress in the accumula- 

 tion of knowledge or in the accumulation of wealth, or in elo- 

 quence, or gives to the world some new invention, or idea, by 

 which his fellow men may be benefitted — possessing unquestioned 

 integrity — the judgment is the other way ; he is, if possible, held 

 in greater honor in his own country and among his own kin than 

 elsewhere. It is the man who is honored, not the prophet. 



Attracted by the golden charms of California, the agricultural 

 promises of the West, or some other distant enchantment, and 

 stimulated by the gorgeous representations of speculators, our 

 young men, without seriously applying themselves to the effort of 

 making their fortunes here, with the comfortable dwelling and the 

 civilizing and christianizing school and church at their hand, 

 shake off the dust of their feet against the homes of their boy- 

 hood and hasten to the^liinds of fever and ague, bowie-knives, 

 revolvers, vagabonds and Modocs, dreaming of early fortunes, — 

 and lying down in early graves. 



One half the courage, ability and determination expended by 

 the mass of the men who have emigrated from Maine into other 

 lands, expended here, would have given the State a population, a 

 name, a wealth, which would have rendered it second to hardly 

 any State in the Union. 



There was a time when there were*^-eat expectations 6f Maine, 

 and if the policy and perseverance of her people had been equal to 

 those of the people of Massachusetts, her progress would have 

 been satisfactory and uninterrupted. But from causes unneces- 

 sary to detail here the growth of the State was checked until in 

 the last decade it had actually retrograded. Every new generation 



