Anson A. Voorhees, Frederick P. Voorhees, Judah B. Voorhees, Willard P. Voorhees, William H. Vredenburgh, Cornelius Vreeland, John W. Vrooman, Gen. William C. Wallace, Francis L. Wandell, Samuel H. Wandell, Townsend Wandell, Charles Wessell, Charles A. Wessell, Josiah A. Westervelt, Charles S. Whitman, Henry V. Williamson, Charles E. Witbeck, M.D., Reynier J. Wortendyke, Professor Witthaus, M. G. Wright, Peter Wyckoff, A. A. Zabriskie, Christian B. Zabriskie, and Simeon T. Zabriskie.

When the Gouda pipes and cigars were lighted President Bergen called the assemblage to order and said:

F

ELLOW-GRANDSONS of our grandfathers! Fellow-Vans, and those of us who have left the van behind us and are in the front! If that be invidious, let me

explain that those of us who are in the front are in the van, and the van is in the front. I hope nobody has been omitted. Fellow-Inlanders! Fellow-Inlanders! At least on

this occasion we are all on the inside. If at times we do not know the advantage of this position, after this dinner we assuredly know the benefits of a good inside.

I wish to take you all into my confidence and announce a secret. I know it will go no farther, for all the guests have been sworn. In order to maintain this secret I must tell it in Dutch: Eindelijk wordt een Spruit een Boom. Of course, you will never allow this secret to go outside of this primitive Dutch interior, which reminds us so much of the homes of our forefathers. However, for the sake of our guests, I may say that I have simply uttered the motto of our Society. It is just as

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 religious freedom, booms in colonizing, booms in industry and prosperity, and booms in liberty everywhere. 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 empire of 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 calling degenerate, improperly, I think,-I would be indulging in what is termed in the newspaper vocabulary, "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 Manhattan and Brooklyn there is a great iron tunnel. It is used for the purpose of conveying gas. Now the gas flows toward Brooklyn naturally. There are more ban

quets on Manhattan than on Long Island, and the flow is outward. Now, that tunnel is about ten feet in diameter, and men have walked through it. The most efficient men we send to Congress nowadays make frequent trips to New York in order to walk through that tunnel. They generally select those hours when the gas is flowing, so that the pages of Congressional Records may be swelled for the sake of admiring constituents. I am happy to state that the guests who honor us at this board to-night have never been through that tunnel.

One of the early ambitions of the Holland Society was to get on top of Knickerbocker's History of New York. For years, you know, it has been taken for a serious production. Even Darling's famous sketches, which illustrated that great work, were accepted as portraits. This, too, in spite of the fact that if there were anything the Dutch did better than making dikes, it was making portraits. There are parts of our country where the book is still taken seriously. It was not long ago that I saw one of our school-books, the fluent and numerous authors of which only discovered within the last fifteen years that the Dutch colonized the Middle States, still embellishing its pages about early New York with Darling's burlesques of the Knickerbockers.

But it is still hard for some people to appreciate a joke when it lasts through an entire book and is bound in solemn calf. I gave a copy of Mark

Twain's Innocents Abroad to a fellow-student of mine at a German university, who was studying English, and his most profound remark after he had finished reading it was that he was astounded that in this age of the world any country could pub

lish a book which betrayed such colossal ignorance of history-" Dummheit! "he exclaimed. At least we have succeeded in startling many of our fellowAmericans with the news that there are others.

I stepped into a New England museum, an historical 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 illiterature!

Ah! we never did have many historical allusions made to us by New England writers - still, fifteen 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 drive them, you can't get a move on them.

It has lately been discovered by one of the mightiest powers on earth - how hard it is to make a few Dutch move on!

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.