shoulder to
shoulder as firm, unflinching, hopeful as ever. Yes, death rather than
compromise of Elizabeth. I would write on their monument two mottoes:
One, "The Right is more than our Country!" and over the graves of the
fifty: "Death, rather than Compromise!"

How true it is that the Pilgrims originated no new truth! How true it
is, also, that it is not truth which agitates the world! Plato in the
groves of the Academy sounded on and on to the utmost depth of
philosophy, but Athens was quiet. Calling around him the choicest minds
of Greece, he pointed out the worthlessness of their altars and shame of
public life, but Athens was quiet. It was all speculation. When Socrates
walked the streets of Athens, and, questioning every-day life, struck
the altar till the faith of the passer-by faltered, it came close to
action; and immediately they gave him hemlock, for the city was turned
upside down. What the Pilgrims gave the world was not thought, but
action. Men, calling themselves thinkers, had been creeping along the
Mediterranean, from headland to headland, in their timidity; the
Pilgrims launched boldly out into the Atlantic and trusted God. That is
the claim they have upon posterity. It was action that made them what
they were.

FOOTNOTE:

[53] By permission of the publishers, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.

PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS[54]

EDWIN D. MEAD

The old Athenian life and our American life have much in common. The
resemblances between Greek character and ours are marked. Those little
Greek democracies were more like our great one than almost any
intervening states. They offer us more pertinent examples and warnings
than almost any other; and they are of peculiar value for us in this,
that their history is rounded and complete, and in it we can see the
various conflicting principles and tendencies working themselves out to
the end, and so learn the full lesson of their logic. Pericles and
Demosthenes speak to America as well as to Athens; and we may well
domesticate their admonitions here to-day and emphasize them to our
people and ourselves as the words of fellow-citizens, of Washington and
Jefferson, of Sumner and Emerson. If the life and burning eloquence of
Demosthenes teach anything, if the rounded period of history whose
darkness he lights up teaches anything, they teach the vitality and the
imperious moment of the appeal, in times of danger and temptation, to
the fathers and to the great pas