distinction they
have kept up until the present day. But of this class of the world's
workers, they were the best and noblest. They were men who thought for
themselves, and refused to be bound in the trammels of a State religion;
men who were ready to dare the perils of the sea and the hardships of a
barren shore for the blessings of liberty and free-thought; men of
sturdy thrift, unflinching energy, daring enterprise, the true stuff out
of which alone a nation like ours could be built.

Such was the character of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the hardy
empire-builders of New England, of the Quakers of New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, the Catholics of Maryland, the Huguenots of the South, the
Moravians and other German Protestants, the sturdy Scotch-Irish, and the
others who sought this country as a haven of refuge for free-thought. We
cannot say the same for the Hollanders of New Amsterdam, the Swedes of
Delaware, and the English of Virginia, so far as their purpose is
concerned, yet they too proved hardy and industrious settlers, and the
Cavaliers whom the troubles in England drove to Virginia showed their
good blood by the prominent part which their descendants played in the
winning of our independence and the making of our government. While the
various peoples named took part in the settlement of the colonies, the
bulk of the settlers were of English birth, and Anglo-Saxon thrift and
energy became the foundation stones upon which our nation has been
built. Of the others, nearly the whole of them were of Teutonic origin,
while the Huguenots, whom oppression drove from France, were of the very
bone and sinew of that despot-ridden land. It may fairly be said, then,
that the founders of our nation came from the cream of the populations
of Europe, born of sturdy Teutonic stock, and comprising thrift, energy,
endurance, love of liberty, and freedom of thought to a degree never
equaled in the makers of any other nation upon the earth. They were of
solid oak in mind and frame, and the edifice they built had for its
foundation the natural rights of man, and for its super-structure that
spirit of liberty which has ever since throbbed warmly in the American
heart.

It was well for the colonies that this underlying unity of aim existed,
for aside from this they were strikingly distinct in character and
aspirations. Sparsely settled, strung at intervals along the
far-extended Atlantic coast, silhouetted against a stern background