Have Faith In Massachusetts One Hundredth Anniversary Dinner Of The Provident Institution For Savings
by Calvin Coolidge
DECEMBER 13, 1916
The history of the institution we here celebrate reaches back more than
one third of the way to the landing of the Mayflower—back to the day of
the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, who saw Prescott,
Pomeroy, Stark, and Warren at Bunker Hill, who followed Washington and
his generals from Dochester Heights to Yorktown, and saw the old Bay
Colony become the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They had seen a nation
in the making. They founded their government on the rights of the
individual. They had no hesitation in defending those rights against the
invasion of a British King and Parliament, by a Revolutionary War, nor
in criticising their own Government at Washington when they thought an
invasion of those rights was again threatened by the preliminaries and
the prosecution of the War of 1812. They had made the Commonwealth. They
understood its Government. They knew it was a part of themselves, their
own organization. They had not acquired the state of mind that enabled
them to stand aloof and regard government as something apart and
separate from the people. It would never have occurred to them that they
could not transact for themselves any other business just as well as
they could transact for themselves the business of government. They were
the men who had fought a war to limit the power of government and
enlarge the privileges of the individual.
It was the same spirit that made Massachusetts that made the Provident
Institution for Savings. What the men of that day wanted they made for
themselves. They would never have thought of asking Congress to keep
their money in the post-office. They did not want their commercial
privileges interfered with by having the Government buy and sell for
them. They had the self-reliance and the independence to prefer to do
those things for themselves. This is the spirit that founded
Massachusetts, the spirit that has seen your bank grow until it could
now probably purchase all there was of property in the Commonwealth when
it began its existence. I want to see that spirit still preëminent here.
I want to see a deeper realization on the part of the people that this
is their Commonwealth, their Government; that they control it, that they
pay its expenses, that it is, after all, only a part of themselves; that
any attempt to shift upon it their duties, their responsibilities, or
their support will in the end only delude, degrade, impoverish, and
enslave. Your institution points the only way, through self-control,
self-denial, and self-support, to self-government, to independence, to a
more generous liberty, and to a firmer establishment of individual
rights.
