Quotes from Henry Cabot Lodge

At the beginning of the eighteenth century a large number of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians came out, who, with Germans from the middle colonies, pushed out to the frontier, and did much to open up the western country.

Sources of interest and excitement were not lacking during the season. If politics ran high, as in the years when revolution was preparing, society could gather at the capitol and listen to the classic oratory of Richard Henry Lee, or the fervid speeches of Patrick Henry, dressed in his suit of peach-blossom velvet, and defying King George, to the great alarm of the conservative land-owning gentry.

On the west of the Neck were long reaches of flats and marshes covered by the tides at high water, and known to the inhabitants of Boston for more than two hundred years as the Back Bay.

It may be possible to make the political history of every colony in turn picturesque and exciting;

There can be no doubt that so far as the upbuilding of a strong and efficient State was concerned, this policy was entirely successful. To justify it on abstract grounds is impossible, and even its political necessity was, to say the least, doubtful. Whether rightly or wrongly, however, this system of harsh repression was the one adopted; and it is to be feared that its authors were little concerned with the need of justification.

With some education, and not a little literary ability, he was as clever and worthless a scamp as can well be imagined, and when he took possession of Mount Wollaston, which he named Merry Mount, — or Mare Mount, — he proceeded to enjoy himself freely after his own fashion.

He had however one great advantage over both his Pilgrim and Puritan enemies, for he wrote a narrative of his adventures in a reckless and amusing fashion of which they were incapable, and thus has kept the laugh forever on his side.

Headed by Roger Conant, a man still clear to us as possessed of leadership and force, these four went southward and westward from Cape Ann and settled at a place called Naumkeag, to be better known in future as Salem.

The little plantations at Weymouth, Hull, and Mount Wollaston, although within the limits of Boston Bay, nevertheless do not concern us here so much as the solitary men who had made homes for themselves upon the land now actually part of the modern city. On an island in the harbour was settled David Thomson, "Gent.," an attorney for Gorges, with his family. Thomson died in 1628, leaving to his family his island and to the island his name, which it has borne ever since.

On Noddle's Island, now East Boston, was established Samuel Maverick, a young gentleman of property and education, who had there laid out a farm, built him a house and fort, where four guns were mounted, and which served as a refuge and defence for all the planters of the neighbourhood.

William Blackstone had laid out a farm and orchard, and built him a house on the western slope of one of the hills, whence he could see the sun set across the windings of the river Charles, and over the wide brown marshes through which it made its way.

True Americanism is opposed utterly to any political divisions resting on race and religion.

I fear that the hearts of the vast majority of mankind would beat on strongly and steadily and without any quickening if the league were to perish altogether.

Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.