h the Pilgrims of Scrooby and Leyden
first fully grasped.

Bradford was one of that venturesome company which, in 1607, embarking
at Boston, in Lincolnshire, sought to flee from English tyranny, and
find a home in Holland. They were betrayed, turned back, and imprisoned.
The next year this young eighteen-year old enthusiast escaped from his
jailers, and made his way to Amsterdam. Here he apprenticed himself to a
silk-weaver, and became an efficient member of the association of
English exiles in Holland.

Upon his coming of age in 1610, he sold off the Austerfield lands that
had descended to him upon the death of his father, and entered upon an
unsuccessful business investment in Amsterdam. This failing, he joined
himself to the Pilgrim colony that Brewster and Robinson, the Pilgrim
preachers, had established at Leyden.

When those far-seeing reformers awoke to the fact that an
English-speaking community in Holland must, in time, become Dutch in
manners, speech, and life, and looked across the western ocean with the
dream of founding a religious republic of English-speaking folk in the
New World, Bradford was one of the most earnest in adopting and carrying
out their views, and was one of that famous company which, on September
16, 1620, sailed from Plymouth in England, to cast anchor, three months
later, in the harbor of the new Plymouth in New England.

It has been said that if William Brewster was the Aaron of the Plymouth
enterprise, William Bradford was its Moses. Certainly he was, almost
from its inception, its leader and deliverer. It was his brain that
conceived and his hand that executed that memorable compact which the
forty-one earnest men signed in the cabin of the Mayflower, as she rode
at anchor in Provincetown harbor--"the first instrument of civil
government ever subscribed as the act of the whole people." It was into
his hands, when Carver, the first governor, died of sunstroke in the
spring of 1621, that the colonists gave the guidance of their affairs,
electing him governor of the Plymouth colony on April 21, 1621--"the
first American citizen of English race who bore rule by the free choice
of his brethren." More than this, we may look upon William Bradford, so
says Mr. Doyle, the English historian of the Puritan colonies, "as
heading that bead-roll of worthies that, from his day, America has never
wanted--men who, with no early training in political life, and lacking
much that the Old World has de