in ability, in education, and in those things generally which mark the
representative citizen of New England, he is a worthy successor of the
best men who have been called to the Chief Magistracy. His public career
has been marked by dignity and an untiring fidelity to duty; his life as
a private citizen has been such as to win for him the respect and good
will of all who know him. He is a man in whom the people who confer
honor upon him find themselves also honored. He is a native of the
Commonwealth, of whose laws he is the chief administrator, and comes of
that sturdy stock which wresting a new country from savagery, fostered
with patient industry the germs of civilization it had planted, and
aided in developing into a nation the colonies that, throwing off the
yoke of foreign tyranny, presented to the world an example of government
founded on the equal rights of the governed and existing by and with the
consent of the people. His ancestors were probably of that Saxon race
which for centuries stood up against the encroachments of Norman kings
and nobles, which was led with willingness into the battle, the siege or
the crusade that meant the maintenance or advancement of old England's
honor, or in the cause of mother Church, and which was possessed of that
brave, independent spirit that, when the old home was felt to be too
narrow an abode, sought a new-country in which to plant and develop its
ideas of what government should be. However this may be it is certain
that from the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony the
family was always represented among the most honorable of its yeomanry,
and among its members were pillars of both Church and State. His
immediate ancestors, people of the historic town of Lexington, were
active citizens in the Revolutionary period, and in the great struggle
members of the family were among those who did brave and effective
service in the cause of liberty.

George Dexter Robinson was born in Lexington, February 20, 1834. Born on