The Pilgrim, and the American of Today | Page 4

seventy years ago. The circle
of darkness is drawn about a little group of Pilgrims who have come
ashore on a sandy and inhospitable coast. On one side is a vexed and
wintry sea, three thousand miles of tossing waves and tempest, beyond
which lie the home, the hedgerows and cottages, the church towers, the
libraries and universities, the habits and associations of an old
civilization, the strongest and dearest ties that can entwine around a
human heart, abandoned now definitely and forever by these wanderers;
on the other side a wintry forest of unknown extent, without highways,
the lair of wild beasts, impenetrable except by trails known only to the
savages, whose sudden appearance and disappearance adds mystery
and terror to the impression the imagination has conjured up of the
wilderness.
This darkness is symbolic. It stands for a vaster obscurity. This is an
encampment on the edge of a continent, the proportions of which are
unknown, the form of which is only conjectured. Behind this screen of
forest are there hills, great streams, with broad valleys, ranges of
mountains perhaps, vast plains, lakes, other wildernesses of illimitable

extent? The adventurers on the James hoped they could follow the
stream to highlands that looked off upon the South Sea, a new route to
India and the Spice Islands. This unknown continent is attacked, it is
true, in more than one place. The Dutch are at the mouth of the Hudson;
there is a London company on the James; the Spaniards have been long
in Florida, and have carried religion and civilization into the deserts of
New Mexico. Nevertheless, the continent, vaster and more varied than
was guessed, is practically undiscovered, untrodden. How inadequate to
the subjection of any considerable portion of it seems this little band of
ill-equipped adventurers, who cannot without peril of life stray a league
from the bay where the "Mayflower" lies.
It is not to be supposed that the Pilgrims had an adequate conception of
the continent, or of the magnitude of their mission on it, or of the nation
to come of which they were laying the foundations. They did the duty
that lay nearest to them; and the duty done today, perhaps without
prescience of its consequences, becomes a permanent stone in the
edifice of the future. They sought a home in a fresh wilderness, where
they might be undisturbed by superior human authority; they had no
doctrinarian notions of equality, nor of the inequality which is the only
possible condition of liberty; the idea of toleration was not born in their
age; they did not project a republic; they established a theocracy, a
church which assumed all the functions of a state, recognizing one
Supreme Power, whose will in human conduct they were to interpret.
Already, however, in the first moment, with a true instinct of self-
government, they drew together in the cabin of the "Mayflower" in an
association--to carry out the divine will in society. But, behold how
speedily their ideas expanded beyond the Jewish conception,
necessarily expanded with opportunity and the practical
self-dependence of colonies cut off from the aid of tradition, and
brought face to face with the problems of communities left to
themselves. Only a few years later, on the banks of the Connecticut,
Thomas Hooker, the first American Democrat, proclaimed that "the
foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," that
"the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's
own allowance," that it is the right of the people not only to choose but
to limit the power of their rulers, and he exhorted, "as God has given us

liberty to take it." There, at that moment, in Hartford, American
democracy was born; and in the republican union of the three towns of
the Connecticut colony, Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, was the
germ of the American federal system, which was adopted into the
federal constitution and known at the time as the "Connecticut
Compromise."
It were not worth while for me to come a thousand miles to say this, or
to draw over again for the hundredth time the character of the New
England Pilgrim, nor to sketch his achievement on this continent. But it
is pertinent to recall his spirit, his attitude toward life, and to inquire
what he would probably do in the circumstances in which we find
ourselves.
It is another December night, before the dawn of a new year. And this
night still symbolizes the future. You have subdued a continent, and it
stands in the daylight radiant with a material splendor of which the
Pilgrims never dreamed. Yet a continent as dark, as unknown, exists. It
is yourselves, your future, your national life. The other continent was
made, you had only to discover it, to uncover