How those first New England Puritans we are speaking of were to come off from their defiance of the crown alive could scarcely be conjectured.  The only ally they had was distance.  The thing they ventured on was the chance that the Royal Government, which had troubles nearer home, would have its hands too full to execute its orders 3,000 miles away across the sea by force.  But they accepted all hazards whatsoever of refusing always to obey those orders.  They held on to their charter like grim death, and they kept it in their time.  More than once or twice it seemed as good as gone; but delay helped them; turns of events helped them; God’s providence delivered them, they thought; anyhow, they kept it; that intrepid handful against immeasurable odds, mainly because it lay not in the power of mortal man to intimidate them.  And I contend that, all things considered, no more splendid exhibition of the essential stuff of manhood stands on human record.  They were no hot-heads.  All that while, rash as they appeared, their pulse was calm.  The justifying reasons of their course were ever plain before their eyes.  They were of the kind of men who understood their objects.

The representative of an English newspaper, sent some time since to Ireland to move about and learn by personal observation the real political mind of the people there, reported on his return that he had been everywhere and talked with all sorts, and that as nearly as he could make out, the attitude of the Irish might be stated about thus:  “They don’t know what they want—­and they are bound to have it.” [Laughter.]

But those unbending Forefathers well knew what they wanted that charter for.  It was their legal guarantee of the privilege of a spacious freedom, civil and religious, and all that they did and risked for its sake is witness of the price at which they held that privilege.  It was not that they had any special objection to the interference in the province of their domestic administration of the king as a king; for you find them presently crying “Hands Off!” to the Puritan Parliament as strenuously as ever they said it to the agents of Charles I. It was simply and positively the value they set on the self-governing independence that had been pledged them at the beginning of the enterprise.

And who that has a man’s heart in him but must own that their inspiration to such a degree, with such an idea and sentiment in the time, place, and circumstances in which they stood, was magnificent?  Was the inexorable unrelaxing determination with which they, being so few and so poor, maintained their point somewhat wrought into their faces?  Very probably.  Strange if it had not been.  Of course, it was.  But if they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which in vision they foresaw, might of all communities beneath the sun have reason for a cheerful countenance. [Applause.]

They achieved immense great things for us, those Puritan men who were not smiling enough to suit the critics.  The real foundation on which the structure of American national liberty subsequently rose was laid by them in those first heroic years.