tional good feeling and comity which brought
about to you the pleasure and the joy of having this manuscript
returned, and so it will ever be. A generous act will beget a generous
act; trust and confidence will beget trust and confidence; and so it
will be while the world shall last, and well will it be for the man or
for the people who shall recognize this truth and act upon it.

Now, gentlemen, there is another coincidence that I may venture to point
out. It is history repeating itself. More than three hundred years ago
the ancestors from whom my father drew his name and blood were French
Protestants, who had been compelled to flee from the religious
persecutions of that day, and for the sake of conscience to find an
asylum in Holland. Fifty years after they had fled and found safety in
Holland, the little congregation of Independents from the English
village of Scrooby, under the pastorate of John Robinson, was forced to
fly, and with difficulty found its way into the same country of the
Netherlands, seeking an asylum for consciences' sake.

Time passed on. The little English colony removed, as this manuscript of
William Bradford will tell you, across the Atlantic, and soon after the
Huguenot family from whom I drew my name found their first settlement in
what was then the New Netherlands, now New York. Both came from the same
cause; both came with the same object, the same purpose,--"soul
freedom," as Roger Williams well called it. Both came to found homes
where they could worship God according to their own conscience and live
as free men. They came to these shores, and they have found the asylum,
and they have strengthened it, and it is what we see to-day,--a country
of absolute religious and civil freedom,--of equal rights and
toleration.

And is it not fitting that I, who have in my veins the blood of the
Huguenots, should present to you and your Governor the log of the
English emigrants, who left their country for the sake of religious
freedom?

They are blended here,--their names, their interests. No man asks and no
man has a right to ask or have ascertained by any method authorized by
law what is the conscientious religious tenet or opinion of any man, of
any citizen, as a prerequisite for holding an office of trust or power
in the United States.

I think it well on this occasion to make, as I am sure you are making,
acknowledgment to that heroic little country, the Lowlands as they call
it, the Netherla