and sinew of the permanent settler.

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of
emigrating hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John
Cotton and Roger Williams in New England, who can doubt that the
personal characteristics of "my brave Oliver" would today be
identified with the "American" qualities which we discover in
1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? And what an American
settler Cromwell would have made!

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of
theological and political speculation, it is easy today to
select, among the writings of the earliest colonists, certain
radical utterances which seem to presage the very temper of the
late eighteenth century. Pastor John Robinson's farewell address
to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous words:
"The Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed
churches, who are come to a period in religion. . . . Luther and
Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they
penetrated not into the whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson,
like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is
identified, none the less, with the spirit of American liberalism
in religion.

In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of
independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking.
In a letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the
principles and feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be
traced back for two hundred years, and sought in the history of