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.
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