Sidney, that, when transplanted
into French soil, produced that violent but salutary Revolution which
has given fresh life to the European world. And contemporaneously with
all this, the American nation came upon the scene, equipped as no
other nation had ever been, for the task of combining sovereignty with
liberty, indestructible union of the whole with indestructible life in
the parts. The English idea has thus come to be more than national,
it has become imperial. It has come to rule, and it has come to stay.
[Sidenote: Victory of the English Idea]

We are now in a position to answer the question when the Roman Empire
came to an end, in so far as it can be answered at all. It did not come
to its end at the hands of an Odovakar in the year 476, or of a Mahomet
II in 1453, or of a Napoleon in 1806. It has been coming to its end as
the Roman idea of nation-making has been at length decisively overcome
by the English idea. For such a fact it is impossible to assign a date,
because it is not an event but a stage in the endless procession
of events. But we can point to landmarks on the way. Of movements
significant and prophetic there have been many. The whole course of the
Protestant reformation, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth,
is coincident with the transfer of the world's political centre of
gravity from the Tiber and the Rhine to the Thames and the Mississippi.
The whole career of the men who speak English has within this period
been the most potent agency in this transfer. In these gigantic
processes of evolution we cannot mark beginnings or endings by years,
hardly even by centuries. But among the significant events which
prophesied the final triumph of the English over the Roman idea, perhaps
the most significant--the one which marks most incisively the dawning
of a new era--was the migration of English Puritans across the Atlantic
Ocean, to repeat in a new environment and on a far grander scale the
work which their forefathers had wrought in Britain. The voyage of the
Mayflower was not in itself the greatest event in this migration; but
it serves to mark the era, and it is only when we study it in the mood
awakened by the general considerations here set forth that we can
properly estimate the historic importance of the great Puritan Exodus.
[Sidenote: Significance of the Puritan Exodus]

CHAPTER II.

THE PURITAN EXODUS.

In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate