kes, other wildernesses of illimitable
extent? The adventurers on the James hoped they could follow the stream
to highlands that looked off upon the South Sea, a new route to India and
the Spice Islands. This unknown continent is attacked, it is true, in
more than one place. The Dutch are at the mouth of the Hudson; there is a
London company on the James; the Spaniards have been long in Florida, and
have carried religion and civilization into the deserts of New Mexico.
Nevertheless, the continent, vaster and more varied than was guessed, is
practically undiscovered, untrodden. How inadequate to the subjection of
any considerable portion of it seems this little band of ill-equipped
adventurers, who cannot without peril of life stray a league from the bay
where the "Mayflower" lies.

It is not to be supposed that the Pilgrims had an adequate conception of
the continent, or of the magnitude of their mission on it, or of the
nation to come of which they were laying the foundations. They did the
duty that lay nearest to them; and the duty done today, perhaps without
prescience of its consequences, becomes a permanent stone in the edifice
of the future. They sought a home in a fresh wilderness, where they might
be undisturbed by superior human authority; they had no doctrinarian
notions of equality, nor of the inequality which is the only possible
condition of liberty; the idea of toleration was not born in their age;
they did not project a republic; they established a theocracy, a church
which assumed all the functions of a state, recognizing one Supreme
Power, whose will in human conduct they were to interpret. Already,
however, in the first moment, with a true instinct of self-government,
they drew together in the cabin of the "Mayflower" in an association--to
carry out the divine will in society. But, behold how speedily their
ideas expanded beyond the Jewish conception, necessarily expanded with
opportunity and the practical self-dependence of colonies cut off from
the aid of tradition, and brought face to face with the problems of
communities left to themselves. Only a few years later, on the banks of
the Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, the first American Democrat, proclaimed
that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the
people," that "the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people,
by God's own allowance," that it is the right of the people not only to
choose but to limit the power of their