Remembering this, bearing clearly in mind the dominating motive that led to the English migration to America in the seventeenth century, we shall be able to understand why it was inevitable that these pioneers of a new race should absorb the characteristics of their soil and the land which it was their mission to subjugate. Whether they were divinely inspired, as some writers would have us believe, whether it was merely one of those accidents with which the pages of history are crowded that brought the storm-tossed Mayflower to her haven in Cape Cod Bay instead of finding refuge in the Delaware as had been planned, is of all things the least material. What is vital to grasp is that this little band came to America as "adventurers," as the word was then used, which corresponds to the sense in which we use the word "exploiters" now; not as "promoters," not as mere transients, but as settlers. England, France, Spain had hitherto sent their sons to cross the sea with a twofold purpose in view: God was to be glorified and the might of the nation magnified by the cross of Christ upraised before savages, who incidentally were to be spoiled of their gold. Nothing is more delightful than the delicious naïveté of the early chroniclers, who in their unconscious simplicity give themselves away at every opportunity and are as obvious as children.

"Then we demand farther what was the cause of his being in this place [Dominica], and how he came thither; he answered, That the King of

Spain did every yeere, send out of every great monastery certaine Friars into the remote parts of the Indies, both to seeke to convert the Savages, as also to seeke out what benefits or commodities might be had in those parts."1

But neither England, nor France, nor Spain understood the philosophy of colonization as colonization, beginning with the settlement of America, has expanded to the present day. Colonies separated from the mother country by oceans, where the power of government quickly went into the hands of the people instead of being autocratically retained by civil or military governors, where from the beginning the spirit of self-government, and selfreliance, and independence was the spirit of institutions, — this conception of colonization, I repeat, was unknown to political philosophy until the settlement of the New World by Englishmen.

In tracing the different methods by which nations have been made, Fiske contrasts the Roman and the English. The former, he says, may be briefly described "as conquest with incorporation, but without representation," the latter differing "in a feature of most profound significance; it contains the principle of representation." Mr. Fiske with his lucid insight has explained one of the reasons why England succeeded where Rome failed, but I am inclined to believe that even more important than the

1 Challon's Voyage, 1606.

2 Fiske: The Beginnings of New England, p. 12 et seq.

principle of representation - great as that principle is, and I would by no means be understood as holding it lightly or detracting from its true value in colonization — is the spirit of the Englishman, whether inborn or acquired no one can say, that leads him as a colonizer to look upon his migration not merely as a temporary sojourn, but as the beginning of a new life and the founding of a home in a new land that henceforth is to be his land. One reason offered for the failure of the French as colonizers in our day is the intense sentimental longing of the Frenchman for his own country, which is so much a part of himself that he cannot be content anywhere else.1 The English may be less sentimental than the French

there is no scientific instrument yet devised for the measurement of emotions or more easily adaptable to new environment; whatever the reason, the colonizer in the early days went forth with the firm purpose to bide in the land of his promise, as his descendant of to-day, the emigrant, turns his back on the land of his birth to find a new home across the seas. To employ a modern simile, colonizers before that historic departure from Plymouth in 1620 were always careful to provide themselves with return tickets, while beginning with that day men concerned themselves only with the means of reaching their destination and gave no thought of how they were to come back.

"A Briton, while he has an abstract reverence for the island of his origin, has rarely the clinging attachment to its soil which a Frenchman has to the land of France." - Bodley: France, vol. i, p. 233.

We are impressed by another extraordinary circumstance in connection with this establishment of the first colony founded under the new philosophy. Hitherto England and France and Spain had sent out expeditions whose members were either soldiers or priests, frankly for conquest; and the sword and the cross were so frequently found on the same hilt that it was not always easy to determine whether its owner was habited in coat of mail or cassock. The passengers of the Mayflower were drawn from a different class of society. They were neither soldiers, buccaneers, freebooters, licensed pirates, nor priests. On the roll we find the name of only one man who had made arms his profession, that doughty old captain, Miles Standish, whose military knowledge served the colonists in good stead when they fought for their existence against the Indians; but who is better known to fame as the romantic hero of a mythical incident that Longfellow created and the world generally has accepted as history. Of priests there were none. To minister to their spiritual welfare they had only one "lay reader."

They were neither soldiers nor priests, these founders of a race; what, then, were they? They can best be described, in terms that are easily intelligible to-day, as members of the middle and lower middle classes; men from the shop and the farm; men not without education and culture, but who were not readily to be distinguished from the great

mass of their fellows, some of whom might perhaps gain fame in the narrow field of established routine, but who had not yet arrived. They were "used to a plain country life and the innocent trade of husbandry," one of their admirers has written.1 But what was common to all of them, which was the dower of inheritance and the unconscious influence of their environment, was a sense of order and system, of thrift and prudent management, of that bent of mind, in fact, that is commercial rather than artistic. These men had in them the qualities that everywhere, at all times, under all circumstances, make good men of business, and this faculty was given almost instant expression. The systematic methods that were adopted in the establishment of the settlements and their governments, that began with the drawing up of the compact in the cabin of the Mayflower, which in its phraseology and purposes suggests the scrivener rather than the soldier, that later expanded into a more complex social and political code as the needs of the colonists made necessary, indicated that form of executive ability which is the special attribute of a commercial people. We find little evidence of military ability or the influence of militarism in the first century of the American colonies. There was a savage foe to fight, and from the beginning measures had to be concerted for defense and offense, but they were incidental; they were necessary for the preservation

1 Byington: The Puritan in England and in New England, p. 53.