The Holland Society of New York - Yearbook (New York, NY)

Page 49 text:

23 secret, though printed on our menu card. In the latest vernacular, it means that the smallest Dutch word will sprout and make a boom. Now boom is Dutch, and you can never start a boom unless you start the Dutch. Think of the Dutch booms which have been started in modern times: booms in declarations of independence, booms in re- ligious freedom, booms in colonizing, booms in industry and prosperity, and booms in liberty every- where. No wonder the old Connecticut Yankee, about two hundred years ago, founded a proverb by exclaiming whenever he came upon anything which excited his admiring surprise: Why, it beats the Dutch! For it is hard to beat' the Dutch. One of the greatest empires of the world discovered the truth of that proverb some time ago. Excuse me, I allude to the empireof Charles V. Now, the .object of a Dutch dinner is to lay the foundation for a smoke. -Then, while we sit and dream away, the toasts are brought on, hot and brown, and just moist enough. If I should depart from the old Dutch words, and make use of those words which we have borrowed from the Latin race, which some of the proudest of us are now call- ing degenerate,- improperly, I think,-I would be indulging in what is termed in the newspaper vo- cabulary, post-prandial oratory, which, of course, as your presiding officer, I should not be guilty of. It would be doing violence to the object of a' Dutch dinner. But there are places, ,of course, where that kind of oratory is always on tap. Between the boroughs of lVIanhattan and Brook- lyn there is a great iron tunnel. It is used for the purpose of conveying gas. Now the gas Hows toward Brooklyn naturally. There are more banf

Page 51 text:

. 2 5 lish a book, which betrayed such colossal ignorance of history- Dzzmmlzezkif f' he exclaimed. At least we have succeeded in startling many of our fellow+ Americans with the news that there are others. I stepped into a New England museum, an his'- torical museum, one day, in search of chronicles. The intellectual-looking curator finally referred me to a dusty upper shelf, where he said there might be a lot of old Dutch trash. Sure enough, there was a little mine there. So I told the learned curator that he was quite right. There was n't an English word in the stuff It was a lot of Dutch z'!!z'!erfa- zfmfe ! ' Ah ! we never did have many historical allusions made to us by New England writers + still, hfteen years of this Society have made a difference. Of course, on this occasion I do not wish to claim the earth for the Dutch. Your fathers, you know, never did have much of the earth given to them, to start with. They were obliged to dig a hole in the ocean and then build a dike around it before they could go ashore to their own country. Still, wherever the Dutch do touch the earth they like to stay. There they generally do stay until they choose to move. You may coax them, and they will hustle. But if you try to drivethem, you can't get a move on them. It has lately been discovered by one of the might- iest powers on earth - how hard it is to make a few Dutch move on I And now we are in the after-dinner clouds,- on the happy smoking grounds. ' Ah ! this is a more blessed smoke than that which rises rank with the smell of human blood from the battle-fields in South Africa.