denunciations of the corruption of the people of Israel, but it was the prophets who from their stern and firm faith saw the coming of the Kingdom. Modernism is a time and a condition when the best men and women are not to be discouraged. They must speak in courage and in hope about the age in which we are providentially placed. To regard it as given over to failure in government, in society, in education, in business, or in religion is to cherish the worst spirit of infidelity. We must look to the principles, few but eternal, which have the spirit of a new and a better life.

Religion through all man's history has been subject to a law of development. To attempt to still force upon the human mind dogmas which were received in the middle ages is to invite a revolution far exceeding the Reformation of the sixteenth century. When any one or any council claims that it has truth without the shadow of error, and that in one church alone can it be found, there is atheism of the most dangerous type, for it has no faith in the Living God, the God of modernism, in the struggle of man to rise out of his fettered conditions into the mission and freedom of the truth.

EDWIN D. MEAD spoke as follows:

Three times in a brief recent period we have seen efforts in Boston to effect changes of names in our old streets and squares. In no case was there any need or reason for the change. The efforts have been ignorant, careless, and almost wanton, but they have been almost successful. The thing is becoming a habit, a menacing habit; and I was very glad when our President, knowing that I have felt rather deeply about it and been emphatic in public protests against it, asked me to bring the matter up for your consideration. It is fitting and important that it should be considered here; for it affects traditions which we prize and associations which it is one of the duties of a society like ours to conserve. I hardly need remind you of the specific recent cases to which I refer. The first was the effort to change the name of old Dorchester Street in South Boston to, I think, St. Augustine Avenue; the second was the attempt to change the name of North Square, one of the most historic points in Boston, to Scigliano Square, by

way of honoring a young Italian councilman who had recently died and who had a large number of friends in the neighborhood; and the third is the movement now before us, which has already secured the approval of a majority of the Boston board of aldermen, to give to the little green in the centre of Maverick Square, East Boston, the name of Doherty Park. It is another and a ridiculous attempt, like that to get the name of Scigliano on the map of Boston regardless of any historical association or interest disturbed, to utilize our old streets and squares as means of paying compliments among our city politicians. The present effort is doubly to be condemned as introducing an element of gross confusion into our nomenclature. If it should succeed and become a precedent, and the greens or parks in the middle of our various squares gradually, by way of honoring deceased aldermen, be given names different from those of the squares themselves, confusion would be inevitable, and what we should witness would be a struggle as to which name should survive. This attempt in East Boston is a wrong to the name of Samuel Maverick, whose name now so fittingly and sufficiently covers the whole square, as it has done during the long years. East Boston and the whole city should resent and thwart this cheap and reckless dealing with the time-honored memorial of one who belongs to the very earliest period of Boston history, and whom we properly bracket with Blackstone himself. I have prepared and submit to the Society a protest against the proposed

action.

But our duty does not end here. I have said that this sort of thing is becoming a habit. It is a bad habit, and should be stopped. One trouble in Boston is that the control of the naming of our streets and squares is distributed among three different bodies; and it is a question whether any one of them is the proper body. No monument or statue can be put up in Boston without the approval of a carefully constituted Art Commission. The names of our streets should be under equally careful and intelligent control; and I speak now not simply of Boston, but of the cities of the whole Commonwealth. I would, therefore, suggest the appointment of a committee of three to consider this matter and, in co-operation, at its discretion, with representatives of other societies, to endeavor to secure suitable legislation to regulate it.

The Massachusetts Historical Society earnestly petitions the Mayor and City Council of the City of Boston to reject the proposal now before them to give the name of Doherty Park to the green in Maverick Square, East Boston. The Society deplores and condemns the irreverent habit, which has lately become common, of urging unnecessary and careless changes in the names of the historic streets and squares of Boston, and trusts that early legislative action will be taken to correct this evil hereafter. It feels the present proposal to be particularly unwarranted and obnoxious, as doing wrong to the memory of one of the most revered names in the earliest period of our Boston history.

When Mr. Mead concluded his remarks, the PRESIDENT observed that the proposition just made seemed most opportune and worthy of consideration. While the particular change of name now proposed, it was true, more properly concerned the Bostonian Society, it nevertheless was altogether appropriate that the attitude of the Massachusetts Historical Society on such a proposition should be understood, and appear of record. Probably not a single member of the Society had, when in Europe, failed to notice the tendency of the Latin races more especially, as contradistinguished from the English, to ignore, and even displace and get rid of, ancient and historic names, substituting therefor something suggestive of a recent event or individual notoriety. He instanced as an example a letter he had that day received. It was dated from Rome, and from No. 89 via Venti Settembri. What ancient name had been displaced by this new designation does not appear. That it was something of historic or local significance may safely be assumed; but to a foreigner what does "20 September Street" mean? The Ides of March Street would sound as well, and imply much more. It was the same in Florence; the same in Paris. No traveller can fail in any of those cities to notice street signs in which the present name is given with the word "giá" or "autrefois" attached to its earlier, familiar and more historic name -appended as it were in brackets, to indicate another case of innocuous desuetude.

Curiously enough, when the English, so conspicuously conservative as respects their own local nomenclature, emigrated to America, they seem to have left this sense of the everlasting fitness of things behind them. Take the street names in London, for instance. To-day there is no American who does

not delight in finding Shakespeare's East Cheap in close proximity to London Bridge; while, going west, he walks continuously through the Poultry, Cheapside, Newgate and Holborn before getting into Oxford Street; or, nearer the river, through Cannon Street, St. Paul's Church Yard, Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street and the Strand on his way to Charing Cross. They are all different sections of the same streets; but every name is carefully preserved, and, coming down from mediæval times, is full of historic associations which we Americans would least of all willingly have swept away.

In all Boston, on the other hand, it would probably be difficult to mention half-a-dozen street or spot designations which have a colonial suggestiveness. At the moment, the President said, he could in Boston proper only remember Ann Street and Hanover Street as names recalling the early Hanoverian period even. He was here immediately informed that the name of Ann Street had ceased to exist, and that it became North Street half a century ago. In reply he remarked that, in his youth, Ann Street certainly still existed as such, and, very noted for its sailors' boarding-houses, had an unsavory, even if historic, fame. It was much the same with Belknap Street, which formerly came down over the summit of Beacon Hill to the Common, and, beyond Mt. Vernon Street going north, was familiarly known as "Nigger Hill." For that reason it had ceased to be Belknap Street and, bit by bit, blossomed afresh as Joy Street. Yet to this Society, at any rate, the name "Belknap" had a peculiarly distinct significance, inasmuch as to Jeremy Belknap we owe its origin. For himself, the President added, he did not hesitate to say he wished that, in London fashion, State Street and Court Street were still known as King and Queen Streets; that Court Square was Prison Lane; and, as was the case for more than a hundred years prior to 1824, Cornhill still led into Marlborough Street, and that into Newbury and Orange Streets. Marlborough and Orange Streets were so called two centuries ago (1708), and they had an historic significance; for the first, named shortly after the battle, commemorated the victor of Blenheim, and the second the great House of Orange, to which belonged that English King to whom Massachusetts owed the charter of William and Mary. These streets, whose names spoke of the early provincial period, and

marked Boston as a town of the-day-before-yesterday-class, ought still to lead out to a Washington Street, the highway to Providence, just as Cheapside and Holborn to-day debouch into New Oxford Street, and that into the Oxford Road.

A very striking case of this utter New England disregard of historical association could, he said, be found in the case of the city of Quincy. The main thoroughfare through Quincy was still the old Coast Road, the first great public way ever provided for by a law (1639) of the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, stretching from Newbury, on the north, through Boston, to Hingham, the border town of the Plymouth Colony, on the south. This road ran over Milton Hill and through Braintree; though Braintree, much less its north precinct, now Quincy, was not yet incorporated when the construction of the road was decreed. Instead of being known for all time as the Coast Road, or possibly, in Quincy, as the Plymouth Road or Way, and having that name jealously preserved for all time, as would have been the case in England, the portion of the old historic thoroughfare in Quincy had since been, so to speak, cut into ignominious, meaningless sections, and was now known, first, as Adams Street, because, leaving the Milton line, it went in front of the residence of President John Adams; then, merging in a comparatively modern and more direct route to Boston, it became Hancock Street, because it passed by the spot where stood the house in which John Hancock was born; then, turning, as ancient roads had a way of doing, at right angles, it was called School Street, because an ugly stone schoolhouse, long since disused, chanced to front upon it; and, finally, again making an angle, it became Franklin Street, a name chosen for no reason, and, in that connection and locality, quite devoid of significance. What other names the old colonial route now masquerades under between Quincy boundary and Plymouth, no man knows; but it is natural to assume it has a different designation in every town. Yet, wholly unrecognized as such, it remains the most historic road in America. On this subject, however, the President added, he had already filed his protest, and it was part of the record.1 New York City even

1 C. F. Adams, The Centennial Milestone: An Address in Commemoration of the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Incorporation of Quincy, Mass., Delivered July 4, 1892, Appendix A, 41-47.