Magna Carta, and Other Addresses

by William D. Guthrie

An impressive example of the survival of this instinct in modern times is afforded by the Japanese, who daily, at innumerable household shrines and public temples erected to Shintō, worship their ancestors as the gods of the home and of the nation. When, twenty-years ago, Japan so easily defeated the Chinese Empire with ten times the population of Japan, the surprise and marvel of the world impelled one of the most brilliant writers of our generation to seek the source of the fortitude, the indomitable spirit and the military valor of the Japanese. He did not expect to find it in their form of government or in their laws, for he realized the great truth that mere forms of government and laws possess no magical or supernatural virtue and are of little moment in nations in comparison with the moral character of their leaders and their people. He discovered, as he believed, that the secret of the civil and martial power of the Japanese and the source of their moral energy and virtue—I use virtue in the Latin sense of valor—lay in the vital and all-pervading worship of their ancestors, based upon the deep-rooted belief that all things are determined by the dead. He found that this homage excited at once the deepest emotion and the most powerful inspiration of the race, shaping their national character, directing their national life, teaching them reverence, obedience, self-restraint, temperance, loyalty, courage, devotion and sacrifice, and making them ever conscious of the prodigious debt the present owes to the past, as well as keenly sensible of the duty of love and gratitude to the departed for their labors and suffering. "They," the dead, he eloquently wrote, "created all that we call civilization,—trusting us to correct such mistakes as they could not help making. The sum of their toil is incalculable; and all that they have given us ought surely to be very sacred, very precious, if only by reason of the infinite pain and thought which it cost." And then he added, "Yet what Occidental dreams of saying daily, like the Shintō believer: 'Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families, and of our kindred,—unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks'?"[6]

In the reverential spirit so beautifully expressed by this Japanese prayer, I venture upon a necessarily brief and imperfect review of a subject of transcendent and enduring interest to Americans—the debt that American constitutional government, under which we enjoy the blessings of civil and religious liberty and of just and equal laws, owes to your ancestors of the Mayflower.

In these days of superlative comfort and affluence, it is difficult for us assembled in this palatial hall, feasting better than the Cæsars feasted and served as not even princes were served three hundred years ago—difficult, if not impossible, is it to carry our minds from this gorgeous and almost oppressive luxury back through the centuries to November, 1620, to the Mayflower covered with snow and ice and buffeted by fierce winter winds off the bleak and desolate coast of Cape Cod. Equally difficult is it to picture to ourselves and in imagination to breathe the air of that first American constitutional convention, in the cramped and chilling cabin of the Mayflower, when the Pilgrim Fathers were assisting, as Bancroft says, at "the birth of popular constitutional liberty," and were discussing the provisions of what has since been called the first written constitution ever framed by a people for their own government from the time history began to record human politics and human successes and failures. I need not stop to read the contents of the completed draft of that constitution, conceived in the then vague prompting, which one hundred and fifty-six years later was to be proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence as a self-evident truth, that all governments must derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Nor shall I read the names of the forty-one immortals who executed that compact in order to evidence their covenant of due consent and promise of obedience to its provisions and spirit. Surely, if there be one constitutional document which should be familiar to all Americans, and particularly to the descendants of the Pilgrims, it is the Mayflower Compact of November 21, 1620.[7]

Many of us believe that the compact thus entered into was the prototype of the Constitution of the United States, that the government it established was the beginning of the republican form of government now guaranteed alike to nation and state, and that the covenant it contained for just and equal laws was the germ from which has since developed our whole system of constitutional jurisprudence. This covenant reads: "We ... doe by these presents solemnly & mutualy in y^e presence of God, and one of another, covenant & combine our selves togeather into a civill body politick, for our better ordering & preservation & furtherance of y^e ends aforesaid; and by vertue hearof to enacte, constitute, and frame such just & equall lawes, ordinances, acts, constitutions, & offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete & convenient for y^e generall good of y^e Colonie, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." Surely, this simple, comprehensive and lofty language, in the style of the Bible open before the Pilgrims, embodies the true and invigorating spirit of our constitutional polity as it flourishes to-day.

In order to appreciate the political greatness and the moral grandeur of the work of the Pilgrims, we should recall that, when the Mayflower Compact was framed, in no part of the world did there exist a government of just and equal laws, and that in no country was there real religious liberty or the complete separation of Church and State.

In fact, the great and now fundamental principle of the separation of Church and State was first made a living reality by the Pilgrims, although, in theory at least, it antedated the voyage of the Mayflower. It was the essence of their holy covenant of congregation entered into years before. And to the Pilgrims chiefly are due the credit and honor of incorporating this principle into Anglo-American polity. A wide gulf separated the Pilgrims from the Puritans in this respect. The Pilgrims, first known in England as the Separatists and Brownists—hated alike by Puritan and Cavalier—advocated religious liberty and the complete separation of Church and State. The Puritans, however, when they secured power in England and later in New England, were intolerant in religion and opposed both to religious liberty and to the separation of Church and State. They were determined that the state should dominate in religious as well as in civil affairs and that it should regulate the religion of all; in truth, they sought to impose a dominant theocracy as completely as Henry VIII. and Elizabeth were determined to have a state church under their own spiritual supremacy and to abolish all "diversity of opinions," if necessary by rack, fire and the scaffold. The Pilgrim, personifying him as you love to in the lofty and generous spirit of Robinson at Leyden, believed in religious freedom, or, as it is differently phrased, in liberty of conscience; the Puritan was determined that all should be coerced by legislation and the sword to conform to his religious views as the only true faith. Although the Puritan theocracy found its most complete development and tyranny in Massachusetts, the colony of Plymouth remained liberal and tolerant. Notwithstanding the terrible record of sanguinary persecutions among other religious denominations of that age, no instance is recorded of religious persecution by the Pilgrims or in the Plymouth colony.[8] You will recall that the famous Pilgrim captain, Myles Standish, never joined the Plymouth church, that no witches were ever burned in Plymouth, and that when a malicious woman accused a neighbor of witchcraft, she was promptly convicted of slander and thereupon fined and publicly whipped. The excesses and fury of religious persecution by Protestants and Catholics alike were the products of the fierce, intolerant and blind spirit of that age. We should judge them not by the standards of the twentieth century, but by those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and must not overlook the fact that in many cases these persecutions were as much political as they were religious.

In the history of New England the Pilgrim is often confused with the Puritan, undoubtedly because the Puritan soon dominated and ultimately absorbed the Pilgrim. Nevertheless, the differences between them on this question of religious tolerance and the separation of Church and State were implacable, to adopt the word of a great American historian. Yet, in differentiating between Pilgrim and Puritan and in recalling the facts as to the origin of religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, the greatest of all the blessings we now enjoy—in giving most of the glory to the Pilgrims, notwithstanding the claims of Catholic Maryland—I am not at all unmindful that in religion and in politics the Pilgrim and the Puritan had many views in common, that our debt to both is quite inseparable, and that our gratitude to them should be eternal.

It is certainly impossible to exaggerate the debt we owe to the Puritan spirit—fierce, indomitable and undaunted, even if intolerant, for it was that spirit which cemented the foundations of our nation. It was the Puritan spirit that gave to England her noblest figures and her most inspiring traditions of battlefields. Towering above all other Englishmen is the lofty figure of the Puritan Cromwell, and second only to him are the Puritans Hampden, Pym, Selden, Milton, Vane, Hale. Hampden—the highest type of English gentleman, with a nobility and fearlessness of character, self-control, soundness of judgment and perfect rectitude of intention, to which, as Macaulay declared, "the history of revolutions furnishes no parallel or furnishes a parallel in Washington alone." If to-day England is to preserve her empire, upon which she boasts the sun never sets, she must appeal to the energy and fortitude and courage of the Puritan. She must invoke the spirit of Oliver Cromwell, whose mighty arm made the name of England terrible to her enemies and laid the foundations of her empire, who led her to conquest, who never fought a battle without gaining it, whose soldiers' backs no enemy ever saw, who humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sea, and who left a tradition of military valor which is now the inspiration of the splendid courage, heroism and sacrifice of England's soldiers on the continent of Europe.

A most important aspect of the Pilgrims' contribution to our political institutions is the provision for just and equal laws contained in the Mayflower Compact, for, as I have already suggested, in that provision is embodied the essence of our whole constitutional system. It has become a truism that the characteristic of the American system of constitutional government is equality before the law. We Americans accept this doctrine as of course. But we should appreciate that civil equality or equality before the law was practically unknown in Europe when the Mayflower Compact was written. In this country its development sprang in great measure gradually from the seed first sown by the Pilgrims. Neither the phrase "equality before the law," so familiar to us as expressing a fundamental and self-evident truth, nor the term "the equal protection of the laws," now contained in the fourteenth amendment, is to be found in the English common law. Nor was either term, or any equivalent, in legal use in America at the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, the phrase "equality before the law" is said to be a modern translation from the French. Nevertheless, equality in duty, in right, in burden and in protection is the thought which has run through all our constitutional enactments from the beginning.