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.
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