gold had vanished:  what belonged to the present were the things done and suffered in His Majesty’s plantations with all that they suggested.  It is most certain that in every age there are thousands who continually yearn for the ‘way of war’ and the life of battle.  Mostly, they fail in their ambitions because in these times the nations fear war.  In the seventeenth century there was always good fighting to be got somewhere in Europe; if everything else failed there were the American Colonies and the Indians—­plenty of fighting always among the Indians.

Besides the romance of war there was the romance of religious freedom.  Everybody in America knows the story of the Mayflower and her Pilgrims in 1620, and the coming of the Puritans in 1630 under John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Company.  I suppose, also, that all Americans know of the Ark and the Dove, and of Lord Baltimore’s Catholic, but tolerant, colony of Maryland.  They know as well the very odd story of Carolina and its ‘Lords Proprietors’ and the aristocratic form of government attempted there; of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Temperance Colony of Georgia.  One may recall as well the influx of Germans by thousands in the early part of the eighteenth century, and the first immigration of Irish Presbyterians, the flower of the Irish nation, driven abroad by the stupidity and fanaticism of their own Government, which wanted to make them conform to the Irish Episcopal Church.  In the whole history of Irish misgovernment there is nothing more stupid than this persecution of Irish Presbyterians.  But, indeed, we may not blame our forefathers for this stupidity.  Persecution of this kind belonged to the times.  It seems to us inconceivably stupid that men should be exiled because they would not acknowledge the authority of a bishop, but, out of Maryland, there was nowhere any real religious toleration; the dream of every sect was to trample down and to destroy all other sects.  Our people in Ireland were no worse than the people of Salem and Boston.  Religious toleration was not yet understood.  Therefore, it was only playing the game according to the laws of the game when the United Kingdom threw away tens of thousands—­the strongest, the most able, the most industrious, the most loyal—­of her Irish subjects, because they would not change one sect for another; and retained the Roman Catholics, hereditary rebels, who were numerically too strong to be turned out.

All these things are perfectly well known to the American reader.  But is it also well known to the American reader—­has he ever asked himself—­how these things affected and impressed the mind of England?