There was certainly nothing of the ideal heroic among the ante-revolutionary people of this country. They did not live for sentiment, or on it. They were not doctrinaires, though they are sometimes so represented; and nothing could have been further from their plans than to make themselves champions of what did not concern them, or to go crusading for fanciful theories and imaginary prizes. They were, for the most part, intelligent, conscientious, God-fearing people at least those were such who gave tone to their communities, and the others either accepted the impression, or achieved the imitation, of their governing spirit. But they were plain, practical people, almost wholly of the middle class, who lived, for the most part, by their own labor, who were intent on practical advantages, and who rejoiced in conquering the wilderness, in making the marsh into a meadow, in sucking by their fisheries of the abundance of the seas, and in seeing the first houses of logs, with mud mortar, and oiled paper for glass in the windows, giving place to houses of finished timber, or imported brick, with sometimes even mahogany balustrades.

When the descendants of the settlers at the mouth of the Piscataqua replied to a reproof of one of their ministers, that the design of their fathers in coming thither had not been simply to cultivate religion, but also largely to trade and catch fish, they undoubtedly represented a spirit which had been common along the then recent American coast.1 The Plymouth Colony was exceptional in its character. To a large extent, the later and wealthier Massachusetts Colony was animated by sovereign religious considerations; 1Adams' Annals of Portsmouth, page 94.

and so were those of Rhode Island and Connecticut. But they are certainly right who affirm that even these men, or many of them, showed a tough and persistent secular enterprise combining with their religious zeal. It was indeed an indispensable element to the soundness of their character. It kept them from wide fanatical excesses. It made them hardy, sagacious, indefatigable, inflexible in their hold on the fields and the freedoms which they, had won.

As compared with our more recent pioneers, who have peopled the territories, subdued the mountains, and opened toward Asia the Golden Gate, the religious element was certainly more prominent in those who earliest came to this country. But even they

were far from being blind to material advantages, and far enough from being willing to live as idle enthusiasts. "Give me neither poverty nor riches," was their constant prayer; with an emphasis upon "poverty." They meant to worship God according to their consciences; and woe be to him who should forbid! But they meant, also, to get what of comfort and enjoyment they could, and of physical possession, from the world in which they worshiped; and they felt themselves co-workers with God, when the orchard was planted, and the wild vine tamed; when the English fruits had been domesticated, under the shadow of savage forests, and the maize lifted its shining ranks upon the fields that had been barren; when the wheat and rye were rooted in the valleys, and the grass was made to grow upon the mountains.

It is easy, of course, to heighten the common, to magnify the rare and superior virtues, of men to whom we owe so much. Time itself assists to this, as it

makes the mosses and lichens grow on ancient walls, disguising with beauty the rent and ravage. It is easy to exaggerate their religious enthusiasm, till all the other traits of their character are dimmed by its excessive brightness. Our filial pride inclines us, to this; for, if we could, we should love to feel, all of us, that we are sprung from untitled nobles, from saints who needed no canonization, from men of such heroic mould, and women of such tender devoutness, that the world elsewhere was not worthy of them; that they brought to these coasts a wholly unique celestial life, through the scanty cabins which were to it as a manger, and the quaint apparel which furnished its swaddling-clothes; that airs Elysian played around them, while they took the wilderness, as was said of the Lady Arbella Johnson, "on their way to heaven."

I cannot so read their history. Certainly, I should be the last in this assembly to say any word-in whatever haste, in whatever inadvertence-in disparagement of those who, with a struggle that we never have paralleled and can scarcely comprehend, planted firmly the European civilization upon these shores. I remember the hardness which they endured, and shame be to me, if, out of the careless luxury of our time, I say an unworthy word of those who faced for us the forest and the frost, the Indian and the wolf, the gaunt famine and the desolating plague. I remember that half the Plymouth colonists died the first winter, and that in the spring, when the longwaiting Mayflower sailed again homeward, not one of the fainting survivors went with her, and I glory in that unflinching fortitude which has given renown to

the sandy shore! Our vigor is flaccid, our grasp uncertain, our stiffest muscle is limp and loose, beside the unyielding grapple of their tough wills.

But what I do say is, that the figures of even the eminent among them were not so colossal as they sometimes appear, through the transfiguring mists of Time; that of culture, as we know it, they for the most part had enjoyed very little; that even in character they were consciously far from being perfect. They were plain people, hard-working, Bible-reading, much in earnest, with a deep sense of God in them, and a thorough detestation of the devil and his works; who had come hither to get a fresh and large opportunity for work and life; who were here set in circumstances which gave stimulus to their energy, and brought out their peculiar and masterful forces. But they were not, for the most part, beyond their associates across the seas in force or foresight; and they left behind them many their peers, and some their superiors, in the very qualities which most impress us. "Not many wise, not many noble, not many mighty," -then, as aforetime, that was true of those whom God called. The common people, with their pastors and guides, had come to the woods, to labor, and prosper, and hear God's word. And upon them He put the immense honor of building here a temple and a citadel, whose walls we mark, whose towers we count, and to which the world has since resorted.

But it is, also, always to be remembered that the early settlers of this country were not of one stock merely, but of several; and that all of them came out of communities which had had to face portentous problems, and which were at the time profoundly

stirred by vast moral and political forces. They were themselves impregnated with these forces. They bore them imbedded in their consciousness; entering, whether articulately or not, with a dominant force into their thought, into their life. They transported to these coasts, by the simple act of transferring their life hither, a power and a promise from the greatest age of European advancement. They could not have helped it, if they would. They could more easily have left behind the speech which they had learned in childhood, than they could have dropped, on their stormy way across the ocean, the self-reliance, the indomitable courage, the constructive energy and the great aspiration, of which the lands they left were full.

This, it seems to me, is hardly recognized as clearly and widely as it should be: that the public life of a magnificent age-a life afterward largely, for a time, displaced in Europe, by succeeding reactions-was brought to this continent, from different lands, under different languages, by those who settled it; that it was the powerful and moulding initial force in our civilization; and that here it survived, from that time forward, shaping affairs, erecting institutions, and making the Nation what it finally came to be.

They may not themselves have been wholly aware of what they brought. There was nothing in the outward circumstance of their action to make it distinguished. They had no golden or silver censers in which to transport the undecaying and costly flame. They brought it as fire is sometimes carried, by rough hands, in hollow reeds. But they brought it, nevertheless; and here it dwelt, sheltered and fed, till a continent was illumined by it. Let us think of this