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[98] had for several years voted No, and was about to do so again, partly because a license policy could not, in the present temper of the city, be enforced, but more because the city had been educated up to the point where it could do without the saloon, he gave to our movement the highest praise, from a large point of view, that it has ever received. The praise was the more noble because it was entirely and absolutely true. Furthermore, the city got upon this thing because it had to; because the forces already at work within itself drove it along this path as by an irresistible impulse. It was a stage of civic evolution which had to come. Still further, let it not be forgotten that, though the exclusion of the saloon and the superb cognate results which have followed therefrom have constituted the most striking outward feature of all these unfoldings, nevertheless, this, as it were, has been but a drop in the bucket beside that larger movement of which it has been a part, whereby a profound civic sense, civic consciousness, civic purpose, and civic consecration have become the normal temper of our great and heterogeneous population. As a New Testament writer urges his readers to ‘lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset’ them, so Cambridge, joining battle with one special besetting sin, has toned up all the forces which make for righteousness within it, has won for itself a living unity, has brought itself under the sway of vast constructive ideals, and has thus been, in very deed, laying aside every weight. And as I believe it is true that, in our university, civics and economics are taught as they are nowhere else taught in America, so I believe that the young men let out from its lecture-rooms have only to repair to our city hall, and to walk through all our borders, to find practical illustrations of good civics and economics which cannot be paralleled in the New World.

10. Thus has it come to pass that, two hundred and sixty-five years from the founding of Cambridge, and fifty years from the organization of its present form of government, the most glorious decade of its entire history is also rounding out. For the sole purpose of great history, of high intellectual privilege, and of the blessings of poetry and other supreme manifestations of genius, is to produce fruit. Noblesse oblige. And all that Thomas Shepard and the bringing hither of the college and the glorious storied days of the municipality, all that the Washington

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