Excerpt from Speech of Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, December 22, 1902, at the Banquet of the New England Society, of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia

The chief sorrow and suffering of the Pilgrim came from the fact that he was an exile. I do not believe that any man or woman who stayed at home in England, loved her with a more intense affection than these men who had left her for conscience's sake. Her beautiful fields, her hills and valleys, her rivers, with their very names so full of music, her stately homes, were dear to these men. They had been born and bred to a gentle life. There were more college-bred men in Massachusetts, and in Plymouth, by far, than could be found in any territory of like extent and population in England. The suffering that they encountered, that their children might live free, was suffering of the spirit and not of the body.

It once occurred to me that we could not be sure that it is an undiluted honor to be invited to speak in eulogy of our Pilgrim fathers and mothers on an occasion like this. Have you ever reflected, Mr. President, that the chief eulogists of the Pilgrim, since we began to celebrate this anniversary, have been, almost without exception, the men who had the least of the Pilgrim or the Puritan element in them, men who would not have been exiles, or reformers, or Pilgrims, under any provocation whatever.

Webster and Choate, and Everett and Winthrop have paid tribute to the Pilgrims better than any one else. They were great and useful men in their time. But they were all absolutely devoted to maintaining the existing order of things. But would not the Pilgrim have been a failure if that were not true? The social order which was the result of the suffering the Pilgrim endured was a social order fit to be maintained.

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