glad children of the light, seeking for "more light." They were warm with youth and adventure, yet transcendentalists mounting a new heaven. Read the compact drawn in the cabin of the Mayflower, -read in it the statement of the object of their coming, and say where has the genius of bard or prophet struck such a strain as those words expressive of their purpose: For the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith and honour of our King and countrie!' Here is no wretched care for personal interests, no craven thought of flight or escape from petty persecutions, no whining solicitude for individual fortune, but the high soul of men who "plant a colony" and found an empire for nothing less than the glory of God, the advancement of their faith, the honor of their country. . . . Do you think any ingobler spirit than the poet's wrought this vision, or would have kept them there when the first winter struck down half their number, and, standing on the hill, they watched the sails of the returning Mayflower fade out in the light of an April day?... You think they shrank from the savage and heard his whoop in their dreams. That is because you are timid, and live in cities. To them the Indian's first word was "Welcome, Englishmen." With now and then a rare and wholesome correction, he lived in peace with them for generations; and tradition has it that two children of the forest begged to be buried at the feet of Bradford, and now lie with him on Burial Hill. Fear! Standish, panting for the elbow-room of perfect freedom, and separating himself from the rest, even as they had all separated themselves from their English homes, dwelt apart across the channel in the grandeur of his solitary Duxbury realm.

You think there was no softness or merriment in their lives; but you forget that John Alden looked in the eyes of Priscilla Mullens and walked with her in the "lovers' lanes' of the "forest primeval." You forget to catch the laugh with which Mary Chilton, ancestress of Copley and Lyndhurst, waded from the boat to the shore-first woman of

You

them all to put her dainty foot on American soil. forget the romance of Alice Southworth's coming later over from England to wed the young widower Bradford, who had loved her when a girl among the English hawthorns.

...

These Pilgrims were men who were greater than the restrictions of English life; who were broader than the huckstering and traffic of their Holland tarrying-place; and who, therefore, fled from both, gasping for larger breath. They were no narrow Puritans, who vexed themselves over questions of method or form or discipline in the Church. They broke altogether from the Church itself, were separatists, and set up their own establishment for themselves and for the New World,—themselves an evangel of religious and civil liberty. Sympathy for the hardships of the Pilgrim fathers! They would laugh at you. They never dreamed of yielding, or of going or looking back. Why, it were worth a thousand years, a cycle of Cathay, to have breathed the air with them, to have put one's name to that cabin compact, to have planted that colony.

Our lives are comparatively humdrum prose or cheap doggerel. Theirs was a pæan. They were idealists, poets, seers; but it was that germinating and rich idealism which flowers out in the world's glory and beneficence. If it was poetry, it is a poetry that lives after them, in a larger vitality and range. Its music is not a far-off strain. It is not confined to a stone's throw from the rock on which they set foot. It rolls across a continent from sea to sea. It is poetry, indeed, but the poetry of industry, of growth, of school and farm and shop and ship and car. now in the hum of ten thousand mills, in hundred thousand hammers, in the bustle of myriad exchanges, in the voice of a mighty people who are a mighty people, and will be mightier yet, because, and so far as they are true to the courage of the Pilgrim Fathers, to their lofty stride and aspiration, to their superiority over fortune and the dust, to their foundations of education and the home,

You hear it the trip of a

and to their consecration of themselves to the glory of God, the advancement of faith, and the honor of their country.

Forefathers' Day! We have no day that is not Forefathers' Day. Our national independence is their separatism. Standish is the common prototype of Grant and Sherman. Whatever is wholesome in our social life is the effluence of their homes. Our constitutional liberty and our constitutional law are the consummate flower of their compact. I doubt if there be to-day a radical footprint that may not trace itself to them; and many an economic and industrial result is an issue from their good sense and honest labor. . . . This great democracy of ours, the broadestbased and securest government in the world, self-sufficient, self-sustaining, self-restrained, and developing new capacity to meet every new necessity and demand of its own stupendous and startling growth, is only the expansion of their own democracy. Let us do our duty by it as faithfully as they did theirs. Doing that, let us await its destiny as calmly as did they, assured, as they were, that liberty is better than repression; that liberty, making and obeying its own laws, is God; and that unless man, made in His image, is a failure, the self-government of a free and educated people, whatever its occasional vicissitudes, will not and cannot fail.

DANGEROUS LEGISLATION

By JAMES MCDOWELL, Statesman; Governor of Virginia, 1842-44; Member of Congress from Virginia, 1846-51.

From a speech made in the House of Representatives, February 23, 1849, on the formation of one or more new States out of the Territories of New Mexico and California. See Appendix to Congressional Globe, Feb. 23, 1849.

Mr. Chairman: When I pass by the collective parties in this case, and recall the particular ones; when I see that my own State is as deeply implicated in the trouble and the danger of it as any other, and shares to the full, with all of

her Southern colleagues, in the most painful apprehensions of its issue; when I see this, I turn involuntarily, and with unaffected deference of spirit, and ask, What, in this exigent moment to Virginia, will Massachusetts do? Will you, too (I speak to her as present in her representatives), —will you, too, forgetting all the past, put forth a hand to smite her ignominiously upon the cheek ? In your own early day of deepest extremity and distress-the day of the Boston Port Bill-when your beautiful capital was threatened with extinction, and England was collecting her gigantic power to sweep your liberties away, Virginia, caring for no odds and counting no cost, bravely, generously, instantly, stepped forth for your deliverance. Addressing her through the justice of your cause and the agonies of your condition, you asked for her heart. She gave it; with scarce the reservation of a throb, she gave it freely and gave it all. You called upon her for her blood; she took her children from her bosom and offered them.

But in all this she felt and knew that she was more than your political ally-more than your political friend. She felt and knew that she was your near, natural-born relation -such in virtue of your common descent, but such far more still in virtue of the higher attributes of a congenial and kindred nature. Do not be startled at the idea of common qualities between the American Cavalier and the American Roundhead. An heroic and unconquerable will, differently directed, is the pervasive and master cement in the character of both. Nourished by the same spirit, sharing as twin sisters in the struggle of the heritage of the same revolution, what is there in any demand of national faith, or of constitutional duty, or of public morals, which should separate them now?

Give us but a part of that devotion which glowed in the heart of the younger Pitt, and of our own elder Adams, who, in the midst of their agonies forgot not the countries they had lived for, but mingled with the spasms of their dying

hour a last and imploring appeal to the Parent of all mercies, that He would remember in eternal blessings the land of their birth; give us their devotion-give us that of the young enthusiast of Paris, who, listening to Mirabeau in one of his surpassing vindications of human rights, and seeing him fall from his stand, dying, as a physician proclaimed, for the want of blood, rushed to the spot, and as he bent over the expiring man, bared his arm for the lancet, and cried again and again with impassioned voice: "Here, take it—oh! take it from me! let me die, so that Mirabeau and the liberties of my country may not perish!" Give us something only of such a love of country, and we are safe, forever safe; the troubles which shadow over and oppress us now will pass away like a summer cloud. The fatal element of all our discord will be removed from among us.

It is said, sir, that at some dark hour of our revolutionary contest, when army after army had been lost; when, dispirited, beaten, wretched, the heart of the boldest and faithfulest died within them, and all for an instant seemed conquered, except the unconquerable soul of our father-chief, —it is said that at that moment, rising above all the auguries around him, and buoyed up by the inspiration of his immortal work for all the trials it could bring, he aroused anew the sunken spirit of his associates by this confident and daring declaration: "Strip me," said he, "of the dejected. and suffering remnant of my army-take from me all that I have left leave me but a banner, give me but the means to plant it upon the mountains of West Augusta, and I will yet draw around me the men who shall lift up their bleeding country from the dust, and set her free!" Give to me, who am a son and representative here of the same West Augusta, give to me as a banner the propitious measure I have endeavored to support, help me to plant it upon this mountain-top of our national power, and the land of Washington, undivided and unbroken, will be our land, and the land of our children's children forever! So help me to do this at