The Landing Of The Pilgrims In 1620

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS AT PROVINCETOWN, CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS, JULY, 1907.

First let me thank you, in behalf of the Sovereign and the people whom I am honoured by being deputed to represent in the United States, for your invitation to join in the celebration to-day of a great event. It is fitting that Old England, whence came the settlers whose landing at this spot you commemorate, should be remembered here in this oldest part of New England and should send you her greeting.

These colonists were men of the right stamp to settle and develop a new country. England gave you of her best, and she gave them in a great crisis of her own fate.

She has ever since watched the fortunes of their descendants, marking their growing greatness, and never with more pride, more sympathy, and more affection than she does to-day.

Many of you may remember to have seen somewhere on the island-girt coasts of Massachusetts or Maine a rainbow stretching from one isle to another, and seeming to make a radiant bridge from land to land. It is a beautiful sight, and still more beautiful when the rainbow is a double one.

In this shape of a double rainbow, bridging the ocean from England to America, there presents itself to me the double settlement of this continent by the men who founded Virginia and the men who founded Massachusetts. The rainbow is the symbol of hope, and America has been and still is to Europe the Land of Hope. Over this bridge of hope millions have passed from the Old World hither, and it is in the spirit of hope for the future of a land so blessed by Providence as yours that we of England send our hearty greetings.

Much has been said — indeed, little has been left unsaid—in praise of the Pilgrim Fathers, for this country is fertile in celebrations, and I cannot hope to say anything new about them. But every man must speak of a thing as it strikes him.

I ask myself, when I think of these exiles coming to make their home on what was then a bleak and desert shore : What was it that brought them thither ? Was it the love of civil liberty ? They loved civil liberty, for they had suffered from the oppression of the royal officers, but it was not mainly for the sake of that liberty that they came, nor indeed had the great struggle yet begun when they quitted England to spend those years in friendly Holland which preceded their voyage hither. Nor were these Pilgrims made of the same stern fighting stuff as the Puritans who came to another part of Massachusetts Bay a little later and became the founders of Salem and Boston.

Was it for the love of religious liberty ? Not at any rate for such a general freedom of conscience as we and you have now long enjoyed, not for the freedom that means an unquestioned right to all men to speak and write and teach as they would. The proclamation of that general freedom and the rights of the individual conscience might not have been altogether congenial to either Pilgrims or Puritans. Certainly it had not yet been made by its noble apostle, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, the most original in his thinking and perhaps the most lovable in his character of all the founders of North American Colonies.

What these Pilgrims did desire and what brought them here was the wish to worship God in the way they held to be the right way. It was loyalty to truth and to duty as they saw it that moved them to quit first their English homes and friends, and then their refuge in Holland, and face the terrors of the sea and the rigours of a winter far harsher than their own, in an untrodden land, where enemies lurked in trackless forests.

No one expected to find gold on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. No one hoped for that fountain of youth which Ponce de Leon had sought in Florida a century before. No one dreamed of the mighty State which was to grow out of the tiny settlement.

Not in the thirst for gold ; not in the passion for adventure; not for the sake of dominion, but in faith and in duty were laid the foundations of the Colony and State of Massachusetts.

Is not this what their settlement means to us now after three hundred years? Faith and duty, when mated to courage (for without courage they avail little) are the most solid basis on which the greatness of a nation can rest. The strength of a State lies in the characters of its citizens.

It is a far cry from Massachusetts to Italy, but when I think of these forefathers of yours, — and here I think of the Puritans as well as the Pilgrims, and of the men of Connecticut and Rhode Island as well as the men of Massachusetts, — men of plain, stern lives, of high purposes and steadfast wills, I am reminded of the famous line in which the great Roman poet says that it was on the austere simplicity of her olden days and the strong men she reared that the might of Rome was founded.

Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque.

Such men were your Puritan makers of New England. They were hewn from the same rock as those soldiers of Cromwell, some of whom were doubtless their kinsfolk, before whom every enemy went down, and to whom was fitly applied that verse from the Hebrew Psalm : "Let the praises of God be in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their hands."

They were men of a bold and independent spirit, but they knew the value of law, and these Pilgrims of A. D. 162o, coming into a region for which no government had yet been provided, bound themselves to one another by a solemn compact signed in the cabin of their ship ; constituting themselves "a civill body politick" with power to "enacte just and equall lawes," to which they promised all due submission and obedience, thereafter choosing one of themselves to be their Governor for the year ensuing.

Many generations have come and gone since the November days when the little Mayflower lay rocking in yonder bay, with the Pilgrim mothers and sisters looking out wistfully over the cold, gray waters, in those days silent and lonely, and with the children, cooped up for many a weary week, asking when, at last, they would be put on shore.

Many things have come to pass, both in England and here, which those grave, grim ancestors of yours might disapprove, good and necessary as you and we may think them. But one thing remains as true now as it was then.

The fearless man who loves truth and obeys duty is the man who prevails and whose work endures. The State which has such men, and to which such men are glad to render devoted service in war as in peace, grows to be the great State. Those men bequeathed to you traditions and the memory of high thoughts and brave deeds which have been helpful to you ever since in many an hour of need, and will be helpful to you while your Republic stands. Many new elements have entered into the American people, and much of the blood of the New England of to-day comes from other than old English sources. But there is an inheritance of the spirit as well as of the blood, and the type survives because it has become a part of the character which each generation transmits to those who come after. So may the type of the resolute, God-fearing men who laid the foundations of this Commonwealth abide with you for ages to come.

You are setting the corner-stone of a Tower which, looking far out over the waves of the Atlantic, shall commemorate those who laid the foundations of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, an event worthy of ever-lasting memory. Yet there is a sense in which we may deem that no monument piled high in stone is needed.

It was said by a famous statesman of antiquity that "the whole earth is the tomb of illustrious men." So the wide land which the descendants of these settlers have covered with flourishing cities and in which they them-selves planted the first seeds of civil and ecclesiastical government is itself their most enduring monument.

In their darkest days one wrote to them from England : "Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to break the ice for others. The honour shall be yours to the world's end." That honour has been theirs and will be theirs.

From Cape Cod here close beside you to Cape Flattery on the far-off shores of the Pacific, cornfields and mines, railroads, and populous cities, State Houses where legislatures meet, and courts where justice is dispensed, all bear witness to the men who here began the work of civilizing a continent and establishing in it a government rooted from the first, and rooted deep, in the principles of liberty.