CHAPTER II.

The Puritan exodus.

In the preceding chapter I endeavoured to set forth and illustrate some of the chief causes which have shifted the world’s political centre of gravity from the Mediterranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the Mississippi; from the men who spoke Latin to the men who speak English.  In the course of the exposition we began to catch glimpses of the wonderful significance of the fact that—­among the people who had first suggested the true solution of the difficult problem of making a powerful nation without sacrificing local self-government—­when the supreme day of trial came, the dominant religious sentiment was arrayed on the side of political freedom and against political despotism.  If we consider merely the territorial area which it covered, or the numbers of men slain in its battles, the war of the English parliament against Charles I. seems a trivial affair when contrasted with the gigantic but comparatively insignificant work of barbarians like Jinghis or Tamerlane.  But if we consider the moral and political issues involved, and the influence of the struggle upon the future welfare of mankind, we soon come to see that there never was a conflict of more world-wide importance than that from which Oliver Cromwell came out victorious.  It shattered the monarchical power in England at a time when monarchical power was bearing down all opposition in the other great countries of Europe.  It decided that government by the people and for the people should not then perish from the earth.  It placed free England in a position of such moral advantage that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon continental Europe.  It was the study of English institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution.  That violent but wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit which animated the preaching of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the political measures of Hampden and Pym.  The noblest type of modern European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism.  To speak of Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of Pennsylvania.  If ever there were men who laid down their lives in the cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise. [Sidenote:  Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]