The Beginnings of New England | Page 6

end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged,
its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it was no

more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the
earth, and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern
Gaul, he was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and
obtain from the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in political
methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying out. With
great political systems, as with typical forms of organic life, the
processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly slow, and it
is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates. The processes
which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the prominent part
played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria, on opposite
sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by London and
New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most interesting
subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much more than
merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must acquire a
knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and feeling
and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we live. In
covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain anything
like complete results. In order to make a statement simple enough to be
generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many circumstances
and many considerations that might in one way and another qualify
what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to discern,
in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme
importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which
has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which
has been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us
to-day, and from the recorded experience of men in times long past we
may gather lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our children's
children. As in all the achievements of mankind it is only after much

weary experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that success is
attained, so has it been especially with nation-making. Skill in the
political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral discipline; and
just as picture-writing had to come before printing and canoes before
steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be tried and found
wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered generations, before
methods less crude could be put into operation. In the historic survey
upon which we are now to enter, we shall see that the Roman Empire
represented a crude method of nation-making which began with a
masterful career of triumph over earlier and cruder methods, but has
now for several centuries been giving way before a more potent and
satisfactory method. And just as the merest glance at the history of
Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from
Rome, so in this deeper study we shall discover a grand and
far-reaching Teutonic Idea of political life overthrowing and
supplanting the Roman Idea. Our attention will be drawn toward
England as the battle-ground and the seventeenth century as the critical
moment of the struggle; we shall see in Puritanism the tremendous
militant force that determined the issue; and when our perspective has
thus become properly adjusted, we shall begin to realize for the first
time how truly wonderful was the age that witnessed the Beginnings of
New England. We have long had before our minds the colossal figure
of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all this world," but as the
seventeenth century recedes into the past the figure of English Oliver
begins to loom up as perhaps even more colossal. In order to see these
world-events in their true perspective, and to make perfectly clear the
manner in which we are to estimate them, we must go a long distance
away from them.