courage which deserve all praise; they devoted themselves at the risk and
often at the cost of their lives to the enterprise of winning souls, as
they believed, to Christ. But the Church dignitaries who sent forth these
soldiers of religion sought through them only to increase the credit of
their organization; they contemplated but the enlargement of their power.
The thought of establishing in the wilderness a place where men might rule
themselves in freedom entered not into their calculations. The spirit of
the old order survived the birth of the spirit of the new.

But the conflict thus provoked was necessary to the evolution which
Providence was preparing. The soul grows strong through hardship; truth
conquers by struggling against opposition. It is by resistance, at first
instinctive, against restraint that the infant attains self-consciousness.
The first settlers who came across the ocean were animated solely by the
desire to escape from oppression in their native land; they had as yet no
purpose to set up an independent empire. But, as the breath of the forest
and the prairie entered into their lungs, and the untrammeled spaciousness
of the virgin continent unshackled their minds, they began to resent,
though at first timidly, the arrogant pretension to rule them across the
waves. Their environment gave them courage, made them hardy and
self-dependent, enlightened their intelligence, weaned them from vain
traditions, revealed to them the truth that man's birthright is liberty.
And gradually, as the reins of tyranny were drawn tighter, these pioneers
of the New Day were wrought up to the pitch of throwing off all
allegiance, and setting their lives upon the cast. The idea of political
freedom is commonplace now; but to conceive it for the first time required
a mighty effort, and it could have been accomplished nowhere else than in
a vast and untrodden land. The Declaration of Independence, nearly three
centuries after Columbus's discovery of America, showed the hitherto blind
and sordid world what America was discovered for. Individual men of genius