In view of these facts we may see how tremendous was the question at stake with the Puritans of the seventeenth century.  Everywhere else the Roman idea seemed to have conquered or to be conquering, while they seemed to be left as the forlorn hope of the human race.  But from the very day when Oliver Cromwell reached forth his mighty arm to stop the persecutions in Savoy, the victorious English idea began to change the face of things.  The next century saw William Pitt allied with Frederick of Prussia to save the work of the Reformation in central Europe and set in motion the train of events that were at last to make the people of the Teutonic fatherland a nation.  At that same moment the keenest minds in France were awaking to the fact that in their immediate neighbourhood, separated from them only by a few miles of salt water, was a country where people were equal in the eye of the law.  It was the ideas of Locke and Milton, of Vane and 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]