When we undertake to criticise the Pilgrims, we ought first to ask ourselves the question, where would they be to-day? Indeed, to be as good as our fathers, we must be better. Imitation is not discipleship. Thee and thou, a stationary hat, bad grammar and worse manners, with an ugly coat, are not George Fox to-day. You will recognize him in any one who rises from the lap of artificial life, flings away its softness, and startles you with the sight of a man. Neither do I acknowledge the right of Plymouth to the whole rock. No, the rock underlies all America; it only crops out here. It has cropped out a great many times in our history. You may recognize it always. Old Putnam stood upon it at Bunker Hill, when he said to the Yankee boys: "Don't fire till you see the whites of their eyes." Ingraham had it for ballast when he put his little sloop between two Austrian frigates, and threatened to blow them out of the water if they did not respect the flag of the United States in the case of Martin Koozta. Jefferson had it for a writing-desk when he drafted the Declaration of Independence and the "Statute of Religious Liberty" for Virginia. Lovejoy rested his musket upon it when they would not let him print his paper at Alton, and he said: "Death or free speech!" Ay! it cropped out again. Garrison had it for an imposing-stone when he looked into the faces of seventeen millions of angry men, and printed his sublime pledge, "I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."
If I were going to raise a monument to the Pilgrims, I know where I should place it. I should place one corner-stone on the rock, and the other on that level spot where fifty of the one hundred were buried before the winter was over; but the remainder closed up shoulder to shoulder as firm, unflinching, hopeful as ever. Yes, death rather than compromise of Elizabeth. I would write on their monument two mottoes: One, "The Right is more than our Country!" and over the graves of the fifty: "Death, rather than Compromise!"
How true it is that the Pilgrims originated no new truth! How true it is, also, that it is not truth which agitates the world! Plato in the groves of the Academy sounded on and on to the utmost depth of philosophy, but Athens was quiet. Calling around him the choicest minds of Greece, he pointed out the worthlessness of their altars and shame of public life, but Athens was quiet. It was all speculation. When Socrates walked the streets of Athens, and, questioning every-day life, struck the altar till the faith of the passer-by faltered, it came close to action; and immediately they gave him hemlock, for the city was turned upside down. What the Pilgrims gave the world was not thought, but action. Men, calling themselves thinkers, had been creeping along the Mediterranean, from headland to headland, in their timidity; the Pilgrims launched boldly out into the Atlantic and trusted God. That is the claim they have upon posterity. It was action that made them what they were.
FOOTNOTE:
[53] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.
PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS[54]
Edwin D. Mead
The old Athenian life and our American life have much in common. The resemblances between Greek character and ours are marked. Those little Greek democracies were more like our great one than almost any intervening states. They offer us more pertinent examples and warnings than almost any other; and they are of peculiar value for us in this, that their history is rounded and complete, and in it we can see the various conflicting principles and tendencies working themselves out to the end, and so learn the full lesson of their logic. Pericles and Demosthenes speak to America as well as to Athens; and we may well domesticate their admonitions here to-day and emphasize them to our people and ourselves as the words of fellow-citizens, of Washington and Jefferson, of Sumner and Emerson. If the life and burning eloquence of Demosthenes teach anything, if the rounded period of history whose darkness he lights up teaches anything, they teach the vitality and the imperious moment of the appeal, in times of danger and temptation, to the fathers and to the great past, to the history and the teachings which in times of soberness have ever had the nation's highest honor. No nation which is virtuous and vital will ever be slave to the past; at the command of virtue and of vision it will snap precedent like a reed. But every people of seriousness, stability, and character is a reverent people; and when a people's reverence for its noble ancestors, its sacred oracles and its venerable charters ceases to be sturdy and becomes sentimental, much more when it ceases to exist at all, then the hour of that people's decay and doom hast struck. On this anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us remember and vow never to forget that when it becomes general or popular among us, as it has become common, to flout at the Declaration and its principles; whenever the nation commits itself to courses which for the sake of consistency and respectability invite and compel its disparagement; when our politics does not match our poetry and cannot be sung; when Washington and Jefferson and Sumner and Lincoln cease to be quoted in our cabinet and at our helm, then it is not well with us, but ill, and it is time to study the compass.
It is right to say, and let us remember it on this sacred anniversary, as an inspiration to duty, that Boston has been the center of the two great movements in our history, the movement which gave us independence and the movement which purged the land of slavery. If we could rear on Boston Common a monument upon which, around the central form of Samuel Adams, should be grouped the figures of James Otis and John Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren and their associates, how much that monument would represent of what was most dynamic in the days which led up to the American Revolution! If we could rear beside it a monument upon which, around the central figure of William Lloyd Garrison, should stand Wendell Phillips, Parker and Channing, Lowell and Emerson, Sumner and Andrew, how much would be represented by that group of what was most potent in the anti-slavery struggle! When the final history is written of the great social and industrial revolution into which we have already far advanced, and which will continue until there exists throughout the republic an industrial equality as great as the political equality which we now enjoy or claim to enjoy, it will be seen that here, too, Boston has done her conspicuous part. And when we survey the movement in behalf of the overthrow of war, in behalf of the peace of nations and the organization of the world, the preëminent task of our own time, we shall find that in this great movement Boston has led America; I think it is not too much to claim that she has led the world. As it was the glory of Boston and of Massachusetts, proudest of cities and commonwealths, strongest in patriotism, to lead the country in the assertion of national sovereignty against every false emphasis of state rights, in that long struggle which nearly cost the nation its life, and which made it forever impossible for the American to say henceforth, "My state is first," so it has been their glory to lead in the creation of the sentiment which meets the peculiar problem and menace of our own age, enabling and inspiring men to harmonize their politics and their religion, and know that their first allegiance is not to their nation but to humanity.