Mr. Page, the United States Ambassador, who unveiled a monument
to the Pilgrim Fathers at Southampton yesterday week, spoke with fine insight of the peculiar qualities of that memorable company. They differed from all other colonists, in Lowell's phrase, in that they went in search of God and not of gold. One is reminded of the last stanza of Mrs. Heinans's poem on the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers :— "Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod.
They have left unstain'd what there they found— Freedom to worship God."
They made the Deity a partner in their enterprise. "To such men there is no such thing as discouragement. Untoward events are merely ordered acts of discipline, and every failure becomes a step towards ultimate success." There were, he went on, no bolder adventurers than these men who linked themselves with the Deity, and their belief in their destiny had never failed their descendants in any period of their national history. He showed how Cavalier and Puritan even to this day had preserved something of their differences in the New World and gave good balance and variety to life there. "Yet Pilgrim and Puritan and Cavalier, different yet, are yet one in that they are English still. And thus in spite of the fusion of races, and of the great contributions of other nations to her hundred millions of people and to her incal- culable wealth, the United States is yet English-led and English-ruled."
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