ia colony was in
large measure in the iron grasp of stern antagonists to all that
pertained to liberty of conscience and to popular rule. Whatever there
was of progress during the seventy years--barring the brief period
of the Commonwealth--that immediately preceded the historic English
Revolution, and the crowning of William and Mary, was despite
the untiring hostility of the Stuart Dynasty. During this period the
lives of Englishmen at home were as the dust in the balance. It
witnessed the very heyday of the infamous Star Chamber. It was of
Strafford, the bloody instrument (though wearing judicial ermine) of
Charles the First, that Macaulay said: 'If justice, in the whole
range of its wide armory, contained one weapon which could pierce him,
that weapon his pursuers were bound, before God and man, to employ.'

"And for all time, the Stuart Dynasty itself remains impaled by
the pen of the same master:

"'Then came those days never to be recalled without a blush--the
days of servitude without loyalty, and sensuality without love, of
dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts
and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the
slave. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning
courtier, and the _anathema maranatha_ of every fawning dean.
In every high place worship was paid to Charles and James--Belial and
Moloch,--and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with
the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to
crime and disgrace to disgrace, until the race, accursed of God
and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the face of
the earth, and to be a byword and a shaking of the head to the
nations.'

"It is our pleasing task to turn now from the dark annals of our
English forebears to the stupendous events of which that we to-day
celebrate in the historical forecast. With the passing years, a
continuing tide of emigration was setting in from the Old to the
New World. Additional settlements had sprung into being, and
the Plantation in its distinctive sense had given way to the Colony,
to be succeeded yet later by the State. The glory of Jamestown
had measurably departed, and to Williamsburg, and yet later to the
now splendid city upon the James, had been transferred the seat of
Virginia authority. New England, despite natural obstacles and
constant peril, was surely working out her large place in history.
Puritan, Quaker,