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 cir

The Colonists transferring great forces.

cumstances 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 child

hood, 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 reäctions--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 a little. Let some rapid suggestions call up to us the times, the new and unmeasured energies of which swept out to this continent, when the colonists came; all the forces of which-political, social, and not merely religious-found here their enlarging arena.

At the time of the seizure of New Netherland by

Elements of the Population.

the English, in 1664, the main elements of the popu lation, afterward composing the thirteen colonies, were already on these shores. Subsequent arrivals brought increase of numbers, except in New England, where the English immigration was then at its end. Important colonies, as Pennsylvania and Georgia, date their existence from a time more recent. But the principal nationalities of northern and north-western Europe, from which our early population was derived, had already representatives here; and what followed contributed rather to the increase than to the change of that population. It was said, you know, that eighteen languages were spoken before then in the thriv ing village which Stuyvesant surrendered, and which is now this swarming metropolis;* and we certainly know that Englishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, French Huguenots, Scotch Presbyterians, Quakers, and Catholics, were at that time upon the American

coast.

From that point, then, it is well to look back, and see what was the governing spirit, the diffused and moulding moral life, which the steady immigration of sixty years, back to the date of the building of Jamestown, had been bringing hither. For these sixty years, in

*This surprising statement appears to have been first made as early as 1643, by the Director-General Kieft, to Father Jogues, the Jesuit Priest, escaped from the Iroquois, who was then his guest. It was afterward repeated by Father Jogues, in his Description of New Nether land.

Coll. N. Y. Hist. Soc., 2d Series. Vol 3: page 215.

comparison with the hundred and ten which followed, were like the first twenty-five years in one's personal life, compared with the fifty which succeed. They gave the direction, projected the impulse, prescribed the law, of the subsequent development; and they, of course, surpass in importance any other equal period, in showing how the nation came at last to be what it was. But these sixty years, also, were vitally connected with the forty or fifty which had gone before them; since in those had been born, and morally trained, the men and women who subsequently came hither. Out of those had come the vivifying forces which the settlers at Jamestown, and they who came later, transferred to this continent. We shall not have reached the toproots of our history, till we have gone back to their beginning.

Look back, then, from the surrender of New Amsterdam, to the date of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, in 1558-less than fifty years before Jamestown began, little more than fifty years before Adrian Block built on this island its first small ship,* and named it "The Restless,"-and you have before you

* This was in 1614; but another ship had been previously constructed on the coast. "Mr. Cooper, in his Naval History, speaks of Block's yacht as 'the first decked vessel built within the old United States.' But the honor of precedence in American naval architecture must fairly be yielded to Popham's unfortunate colony on the Kennebec. The ‘Virginia,' of Sagadahoc, was the first European-built vessel within the original thirteen States. The Restless,' of Manhattan, was the pioneer craft of New York."

Brodhead's Hist. of New York. Vol. I., page 55. (Note.)