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exhalation from the good things at a Pilgrim Society dinner. Not in the least. They had no faith in the Divine institution of a system which gives Teague, because he can dig, as much influence as Ralph, because he can think, nor in personal at the expense of general freedom. Their view of human rights was not so limited that it could not take in human relations and duties also. They would have been likely to answer the claim, “I am as good as anybody," by a quiet, "Yes, for some things, but not for others; as good, doubtless, in your place, where all things are good." What the early settlers of Massachusetts did intend, and what they accomplished, was the founding here of a new England, and a better one, where the political superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles, either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignorances as the seed plot of vice and unreason; but an elective magistracy and clergy, land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, will ye, nill ye, instead. Here at last, it should seem, simple manhood is to have a chance to play his stake against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged by those three hoary sharpers, Prerogative, Patricianism, and Priestcraft.

We have said that the details of New England history were essentially dry and unpoetic. Everything is near, authentic, and petty. There is no mist of distance to soften outlines, no mirage of tradition to give characters and events an imaginative loom. So much downright work was perhaps never wrought on the earth's surface in the same space of time as during the first forty years after the settlement. . . . There was, indeed, one poetic side to the existence otherwise so narrow and practical;

and to have conceived this, however partially, is the one original and American thing in Cooper. This diviner glimpse illumines the lives of our Daniel Boone, the man of civilization and old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes, confronted, too, for the first time, with his real self, and so led gradually to disentangle the original substance of his manhood from the artificial results of culture. Here was our new Adam of the wilderness, forced to name anew, not the visible creation of God, but the invisible creation of man, in those forms that lie at the base of social institutions, so insensibly moulding personal character and controlling individual action. Here is the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that of Achilles,2 as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote,3 as romantic in its relation to our homespun and plebeian mythus as Arthur in his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry. . . .

There have been two great distributing centers of the English race on this continent, Massachusetts and Virginia. Each has impressed the character of its early legislators on the swarms it has sent forth. Their ideals are in some fundamental respects the opposites of each other, and we can only account for it by an antagonism of thought beginning with the early framers of their

1 James Fenimore Cooper, one of the earliest American novelists, author of the various volumes of the Leatherstocking Tales, to which reference is here made. In these tales is depicted in somewhat idealistic form the life of the American Indians in their contact with the whites.

2 The central hero of Homer's Iliad, the world's greatest epic, and the Greek ideal of bravery and honor.

The hero of a Spanish romance by Cervantes, published in 1605. Quixote represents the ideals of medieval chivalry in such an exaggerated form that the narrative of his exploits did much to undermine the whole system of chivalry.

respective institutions. New England abolished caste; in Virginia they still talk of "quality folks." But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled. Every man was to be trained, not only to the use of arms, but of his wits also; and it is these which alone make the others effective weapons for the maintenance of freedom. You may disarm the hands, but not the brains, of a people, and to know what should be defended is the first condition of successful defense. Simple as it seems, it was a great discovery that the key of knowledge could turn both ways, that it could open, as well as lock, the door of power to the many.

I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conception and superhuman foresight. An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his traveling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latest possibilities of English law and English character, by clearing away the fences by which

the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of natural right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.

THE QUAKER OF THE OLDEN TIME1
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

The Quaker of the olden time!
How calm and firm and true,
Unspotted by its wrong and crime,
He walked the dark earth through.
The lust of power, the love of gain,
The thousand lures of sin

Around him, had no power to stain
The purity within.

With that deep insight which detects
All great things in the small,

And knows how each man's life affects
The spiritual life of all,

He walked by faith and not by sight,
By love and not by law;

1 One definite contribution to the American spirit was made in practically all the colonies by the Quakers or members of the Society of Friends. In the face of persecution or of social ostracism they stood firm in their opposition to all types of formalism in religion; in their belief in a personal interpretation of faith and worship; in their opposition to the use of force; and in their belief in the brotherhood of man. The poet Whittier was a Quaker.

From "Songs of Labor in Reform," in Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge edition). Copyright, 1894, by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Used by permission of the publishers.

The presence of the wrong or right
He rather felt than saw.

He felt that wrong with wrong partakes,
That nothing stands alone,

That whoso gives the motive, makes
His brother's sin his own.
And, pausing not for doubtful choice
Of evils great or small,
He listened to that inward voice
Which called away from all.

O Spirit of that early day,

So pure and strong and true,
Be with us in the narrow way
Our faithful fathers knew.
Give strength the evil to forsake,
The cross of Truth to bear,
And love and reverent fear to make
Our daily lives a prayer!

GOD MAKES A PATH1

ROGER WILLIAMS (1604-1683)

God makes a path, provides a guide,
And feeds in wilderness.

His glorious name while breath remains,

O that I may confess!

Lost many a time, I have had no guide,

No house, but hollow tree,

In stormy winter night no fire,

No food, no company.

1 The great contribution which Rhode Island under Williams made to the American spirit was that of religious toleration.

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