Читать книгу Magna Carta, and Other Addresses онлайн

38 страница из 40

There is no time to-night, even if your patience would bear with me longer, to trace the growth of the political principles which we find in the history of the Plymouth colony and underlying the experiment in republican government there initiated under the Mayflower Compact. If the tree is to be judged by its fruit, the framing of that compact in 1620 was one of the most important events in the history of the American people, and the document itself is one of the most interesting and inspiring of American constitutional documents. But I feel that I may appropriately suggest to you questions which are of immediate and urgent concern to us all, and they are whether the quickening and stirring message of the Mayflower has really endured—whether the sterling qualities of the Pilgrim and the Puritan have survived—whether the descendants of the Pilgrims have inherited and can perpetuate the invincible spirit, the unconquerable moral energy, the indomitable steadfastness of their ancestors—and whether these qualities are available in our own day to guide the nation safely and wisely through the inevitable crisis which we are approaching as the whole civilization of Europe is being daily more and more engulfed in the abyss of this awful war. These are problems which our generation must face sooner or later. And who should be better qualified to guide us—for it is leadership that we need—than men who inherit the spirit and the traditions of the Pilgrim and the Puritan?