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, recallsanother December night two hundred and seventy years ago. The circle ofdarkness is drawn about a little group of Pilgrims who have come ashoreon 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 thehome, the hedgerows and cottages, the church towers, the libraries anduniversities, the habits and associations of an old civilization, thestrongest and dearest ties that can entwine around a human heart,abandoned now definitely and forever by these wanderers; on the otherside a wintry forest of unknown extent, without highways, the lair ofwild beasts, impenetrable except by trails known only to the savages,whose sudden appearance and disappearance adds mystery and terror to theimpression the imagination has conjured up of the wilderness.
This darkness is symbolic. It stands for a vaster obscurity. This is anencampment on the edge of a continent, the proportions of which areunknown, the form of which is only conjectured. Behind this screen offorest are there hills, great streams, with broad valleys, ranges ofmountains perhaps, vast plains, lakes, other wildernesses of illimitableextent? The adventurers on the James hoped they could follow the streamto highlands that looked off upon the South Sea, a new route to India andthe Spice Islands. This unknown continent is attacked, it is true, inmore than one place. The Dutch are at the mouth of the Hudson; there is aLondon company on the James; the Spaniards have been long in Florida, andhave carried religion and civilization into the deserts of New Mexico.Nevertheless, the continent, vaster and more varied than was guessed, ispractically undiscovered, untrodden. How inadequate to the subjection ofany considerable portion of it seems this little band of ill-equippedadventurers, who cannot without peril of life stray a league from the baywhere the "Mayflower" lies.
It is not to be supposed that the Pilgrims had an adequate conception ofthe continent, or of the magnitude of their mission on it, or of thenation to come of which they were laying the foundations. They did theduty that lay nearest to them; and the duty done today, perhaps withoutprescience of its consequences, becomes a permanent stone in the edificeof the future. They sought a home in a fresh wilderness, where they mightbe undisturbed by superior human authority; they had no doctrinariannotions of equality, nor of the inequality which is the only possiblecondition of liberty; the idea of toleration was not born in their age;they did not project a republic; they established a theocracy, a churchwhich assumed all the functions of a state, recognizing one SupremePower, 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—tocarry out the divine will in society. But, behold how speedily theirideas expanded beyond the Jewish conception, necessarily expanded withopportunity and the practical self-dependence of colonies cut off fromthe aid of tradition, and brought face to face with the problems ofcommunities left to themselves. Only a few years later, on the banks ofthe Connecticut, Thomas Hooker, the first American Democrat, proclaimedthat "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of thepeople," 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 tochoose but to limit the power of their rulers, and