to an organized
Commonwealth, offering a wide field for pauper labourers. Some of them
were of good social rank and highest education, most of them in decent
circumstances, none of them in absolute poverty. And a few years later
they were to be joined by a far larger company with leaders and many
brethren of ancient birth and landed possessions, men of "education,
figure; and estate," all ready to convert property into cash and to place
it in joint-stock, not as the basis of promising speculation, but as the
foundation of a church.

It signifies not how much or how little one may sympathize with their
dogma or their discipline now. To the fact that the early settlement of
that wilderness was by self-sacrificing men of earnestness and faith, who
were bent on "advancing the Gospel of Christ in remote parts of the
world," in the midst of savage beasts, more savage men, and unimaginable
difficulties and dangers, there can be little doubt that the highest
forms of Western civilization are due. Through their provisional
theocracy, the result of the independent church system was to establish
the true purport of the Reformation, absolute religious equality. Civil
and political equality followed as a matter of course.

Two centuries and a half have passed away.

There are now some seventy or eighty millions of the English-speaking
race on both sides the Atlantic, almost equally divided between the
United Kingdom and the United Republic, and the departure of those
outcasts of James has interest and significance for them all.

Most fitly then, as a distinguished American statesman has remarked, does
that scene on board the little English vessel, with the English pastor
uttering his farewell blessing to a handful of English exiles for
conscience sake; depicted on canvas by eminent artists, now adorn the
halls of the American Congress and of the British Parliament. Sympathy
with one of the many imperishable bonds of union between the two great
and scarcely divided peoples.

We return to Barneveld in his solitary prison.

CHAPTER XX.

Barneveld's Imprisonment--Ledenberg's Examination and Death--
Remonstrance of De Boississe--Aerssens admitted to the order of
Knights--Trial of the Advocate--Barneveld's Defence--The States
proclaim a Public Fast--Du Maurier's Speech before the Assembly--
Barneveld's Sentence--Barneveld prepares for Death--Goes to
Execution.

The Advocate had been removed within a few