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ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE PROVIDENT INSTITUTION FOR
SAVINGS

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