rchase of physical toil,
universal and intense, and of watching night and day--there came from
the old country, from the high places of authority, the peremptory
mandate: Send us back that charter! Under the clause of it granting you
the rule of your own affairs, you are claiming more than was intended or
can be allowed. Send it back! And what was the answer? Mind, there were
less than 5,000 souls of them, all told: less than 1,000 grown men. On
the one hand the power of England--on the other that scrap of a new-born
State, sore pressed with difficulties already.

What was the answer? Why, they got out some old cannon they had and
mounted them, and moulded a stock of bullets, and distributed powder,
and took of every male citizen above the age of sixteen an oath of
allegiance to Massachusetts--and then set their teeth and waited to see
what would happen. And that was their answer. It meant distinctly: Our
charter, which we had of the King's majesty (and therefore came we
hither), is our lawful possession--fair title to the territory we occupy
and the rights we here exercise. And whoever wants it has got to come
and take it. Surrender it we never will! [Applause.]

Nor was that the only time. Again and again during the Colony's initial
stage, when it was exceedingly little of stature and had enough to do to
keep the breath of life in it, that demand was renewed with rising anger
and with menaces; yet never could those Puritans of the Bay be scared
into making a solitary move of any kind toward compliance with it. David
with his sling daring Goliath in armor is an insufficient figure of that
nerve, that transcendent grit, that superb gallantry. Where will you
look for its parallel? I certainly do not know. [Applause.]

They used to tell during the war of a colonel who was ordered to assault
a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get
a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and
became immovable. Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the
same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty,
called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice: "Oh, don't give
it up so! Forward again! Forward! Charge! Great heavens, men, do you
want to live forever?" [Laughter.]

How those first New England Puritans we are speaking of were to come off
from their defiance of the crown alive could scarcely be conjectured.
The only ally they had was distance.