Those unconscious, pathetic heroes, pulling their shallop ashore on the Cape yonder in 1620—­what reverence can exceed their just merit!  What praise can compass the virtue of that sublime, unconquerable manhood, by which in the calamitous, woful days that followed, not accepting deliverance, letting the Mayflower go back empty, they stayed perishing by the graves of their fallen; rather, stayed fast by the flickering flame of their living truth, and so invoked and got on their side forever the force of that great law of the universe, “except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”  How richly and how speedily fruitful that seed was, we know.  It did not wait for any large unfolding of events on these shores to prove the might of its quickening.  “Westward the star of empire takes its way.”  Yes, but the first pulse of vital power from the new State moved eastward.  For behold it still in its young infancy—­if it can be said to have had an infancy—­stretching a strong hand of help across the sea to reinforce the cause of that Commonwealth, the rise of which marks the epoch of England’s new birth in liberty. [Applause.]

The pen of New England, fertilized by freedom and marvellously prolific ere a single generation passed, was indeed the Commonwealth’s true nursing mother.  Cromwell, Hampden, Sidney, Milton, Owen, were disciples of teachers mostly from this side the Atlantic.  Professor Masson, of Edinburgh University, in his admirable “Life of Milton,” enumerates seventeen New England men whom he describes as “potent” in England in that period.  Numbers went to England in person, twelve of the first twenty graduates of Harvard College prior to 1646, among them; and others, not a few representing the leading families of the colonies, who going over with their breasts full of New England milk, nourished the heart of the great enterprise; “performed,” so Palfrey tells us, “parts of consequence in the Parliamentary service, and afterward in the service of the Protectorate.”  It is not too much to say that on the fields of Marston Moor and Naseby New England appeared; and that those names may fairly be written on her banners. [Applause.]

That, I would observe—­and Mr. Grady would freely concede it—­was before there was much mingling anywhere of the Puritan and the Cavalier blood, save as it ran together between Cromwell’s Ironsides and Rupert’s troopers.  I would observe also that the propagation eastward inaugurated in that early day has never ceased.  The immigration of populations hither from Europe, great a factor as it has been in shaping the history of this continent, has not been so great a factor as the emigration of ideas the other way has been, and continues to be, in shaping the history of Europe, and of the mother country most of all.  But that carries me where I did not intend to go.

An inebriated man who had set out to row a boat across a pond was observed to pursue a very devious course.  On being hailed and asked what the matter was, he replied that it was the rotundity of the earth that bothered him; he kept sliding off.  So it is the rotundity of my subject that bothers me.  But I do mean to stay on one hemisphere of it if possible. [Laughter.]