Salt Lake Telegram | 1907-01-25 | Page 2 | Boston's Lack of Humor

BOSTON'S LACK Or JTUMOE. I have said that Boston loves relics. The relies which it loves best are the relies of England's discomfiture. The stately portraits of Copley are of small account compared to the memorials of what was nothing else than a civil war. Faneuil Hall, the Covent Garden of Boston, presented t-o the city by Peter Faneuil some thirty years 'before the birth of "liberty, is now but an emblem em-blem of revolt." The Old South meeting meet-ing place is endeared to the citizens of Boston as "the sanctuary of freedom. free-dom. " A vast monument, erected a mere quarter of a century ago. com rremorates the "Boston massage." And wherever you turn vou are re minded of an episode which might easily eas-ily be forgotten. To an Englishman these historical landmarks are inoffen sive. The dispute which they recall aroused far less emotion on our side the ocean than on the other, and long ago we saw the events of the revolu tion in a fair perspective. In truth, this insistence on the past is not wholly creditable to Boston's sense of humor. The passionate peans which Otis and his friends sang to liberty were irrele vant. Liberty was never for a moment in danger, if liberty, indeed, be a thing of fact and not of watchwords. The leaders of the revolution wrote and spoke as though it wss their duty to throw off the yoke of the foreigner a yoke as heavy as that which atholic fpain cast upon Protestant Holland. But there was no yoke to be thrown off. because no yoke was ever imposed, and Boston might have celebrated greater events in her history than that which an American statesman has wiselv called "the glittering and sounding generalities of natural rights. ("has. Whitley in Blackwood's Magazine.