



Produced by David Widger





THE PILGRIM, AND THE AMERICAN OF TODAY--1892

By Charles Dudley Warner

This December evening, the imagination, by a law of contrast, recalls
another December night two hundred and seventy years ago. The circle of
darkness is drawn about a little group of Pilgrims who have come ashore
on a sandy and inhospitable coast. On one side is a vexed and wintry sea,
three thousand miles of tossing waves and tempest, beyond which lie the
home, the hedgerows and cottages, the church towers, the libraries and
universities, the habits and associations of an old civilization, the
strongest and dearest ties that can entwine around a human heart,
abandoned now definitely and forever by these wanderers; on the other
side a wintry forest of unknown extent, without highways, the lair of
wild beasts, impenetrable except by trails known only to the savages,
whose sudden appearance and disappearance adds mystery and terror to the
impression the imagination has conjured up of the wilderness.

This darkness is symbolic. It stands for a vaster obscurity. This is an
encampment on the edge of a continent, the proportions of which are
unknown, the form of which is only conjectured. Behind this screen of
forest are there hills, great streams, with broad valleys, ranges of
mountains perhaps, vast plains, lakes, 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 rulers, and he exhorted, "as God
has given us liberty to take it." There, at that moment, in Hartford,
American democracy was born; and in the republican union of the three
towns of the Connecticut colony, Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, was
the germ of the American federal system, which was adopted into the
federal constitution and known at the time as the "Connecticut
Compromise."

It were not worth while for me to come a thousand miles to say this, or
to draw over again for the hundredth time the character of the New
England Pilgrim, nor to sketch his achievement on this continent. But it
is pertinent to recall his spirit, his attitude toward life, and to
inquire what he would probably do in the circumstances in which we find
ourselves.

It is another December night, before the dawn of a new year. And this
night still symbolizes the future. You have subdued a continent, and it
stands in the daylight radiant with a material splendor of which the
Pilgrims never dreamed. Yet a continent as dark, as unknown, exists. It
is yourselves, your future, your national life. The other continent was
made, you had only to discover it, to uncover it. This you must make
yourselves.

We have finished the outline sketch of a magnificent nation. The