Address of President Roosevelt on the Occasion of the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument, Provincetown, Massachusetts, August 20, 1907

WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1907

It is not too much to say that the event commemorated by the monument which we have come here to dedicate was one of those rare events which can in good faith be called of world importance. The coming hither of the Pilgrim three centuries ago, followed in far larger numbers by his sterner kinsmen, the Puritans, shaped the destinies of this continent, and therefore profoundly affected the destiny of the whole world. Men of other races, the Frenchman and the Spaniard, the Dutchman, the German, the Scotchman, the Irishman, and the Swede, made settlements within what is now the United States, during the colonial period of our history and before the Declaration of Independence; and since then there has been an ever-swelling immigration from Ireland and from the mainland of Europe; but it was the Englishman who settled in Virginia and the Englishman who settled in Massachusetts who did most in shaping the lines of our national development.
We can not as a nation be too profoundly grateful for the fact that the Puritan has stamped his influence so deeply on our national life. We need have but scant patience with the men who now rail at the Puritan’s faults. They were evident, of course, for it is a quality of strong natures that their failings, like their virtues, should stand out in bold relief; but there is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present. Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell, and the work they have to do. The Puritan’s task was to conquer a continent; not merely to overrun it, but to settle it, to till it, to build upon it a high industrial and social life; and, while engaged in the rough work of taming the shaggy wilderness, at that very time also to lay deep the immovable foundations of our whole American system of civil, political, and religious liberty achieved through the orderly process of law. This was the work allotted him to do; this is the work he did; and only a master spirit among men could have done it.