Love Quote by Henry Cabot Lodge

Lodge is selling austerity as inheritance, turning geography into a moral credential. The line catalogs New England in hard negatives - harsh climate, barren soil, rough and stormy coast - then pivots to the real payload: and yet we love it. That "yet" is doing the political work. It reframes deprivation not as failure but as proof of character, a region made admirable precisely because it offers less comfort and more resistance. The affection he claims is not sentimental; it's a badge, a way to say: we endure, therefore we deserve.

The comparative flourish - "a love passing that of dwellers in more favored regions" - smuggles in superiority while pretending to be humble. Those other places have it easy; their attachment is implicitly shallow, purchased by sunshine and fertile ground. New Englanders, by contrast, love without incentives. It's a neat conversion of scarcity into status, the emotional equivalent of the Protestant work ethic: virtue earned through struggle, community forged by weather.

Context matters. Lodge, a Brahmin Republican and nationalist, was writing and speaking in an America roiled by industrialization, immigration, and regional jostling for power. Invoking New England as stern, self-disciplined, and proudly rooted reinforces an older elite's claim to cultural authority. The landscape becomes a character witness for the people - and, by extension, for the kind of America Lodge wanted to lead: tough, restrained, and convinced that hardship produces legitimacy.