One after another, the Goths, the
Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, and the Tatars, by the sheer tidal
force of their numbers threatened to engulf the ancient and medieval
civilization of Europe. But neither in the motives prompting them nor
in the effect they produced, nor yet in the magnitude of their
numbers, will such migrations bear comparison with the great exodus of
European peoples which in the course of three centuries has made the
United States of America. That movement of races--first across the sea
and then across the land to yet another sea, which set in with the
English occupation of Virginia in 1607 and which has continued from
that day to this an almost ceaseless stream of millions of human
beings seeking in the New World what was denied them in the Old--has
no parallel in history.
It was not until the seventeenth century that the door of the
wilderness of North America was opened by Englishmen; but, if we are
interested in the circumstances and ideas which turned Englishmen
thither, we must look back into the wonderful sixteenth century--and
even into the fifteenth, for; it was only five or six years after the
great Christopher's discovery, that the Cabots, John and Sebastian,
raised the Cross of St. George on the North American coast. Two
generations later, when the New World was pouring its treasure into
the lap of Spain and when all England was pulsating with the new and
noble life of the Elizabethan Age, the sea captains of the Great Queen
challenged the Spanish monarch, defeated his Great Armada, and
unfurled the English flag, symbol of a changing era, in every sea.
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