"Gentlemen, you have heard these orders read; it is your part, in your severall places, to observe them exactly.... I can not suspect your Courage and Resolution; your Conscience and your Loyalty hath brought you hither to fight for your Religion, your King, and the Laws of the Land; you shall fight with no Enemies, but Traitours, most of them Brownists, Anabaptists, and Atheists, such who desire to destroy both Church and State, and who have already condemned you to ruin for being Loyall to vs."
Here, then, were a handful of men repudiated by their king, cast off by their commercial partners, a prey to the consequences of civil war at home, and living by sufferance in the midst of a fierce and warlike people, compelled at last to work out their own political destiny. What wonder that with them self-preservation stood first, last, and always! All other settlements in New England were made with the hope of gain alone, few, if any, colonists meaning to make a permanent home in its wilds. We may not withhold the respect due to these Pilgrims, who were essentially a unit, embodying the germ of civil, political, and religious liberty. They beheld from the beach the vanishing sail of the Mayflower as men who had accepted what fate may bring to them. They did not mean to go back.
THE PILGRIMS' FIRST ENCOUNTER.