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which labor sheds--and the blood of men are the warp of this fair fabric which the world admires, and the sighs and tears of women are the woof of it. Men groped in the dark, where now it is light. By faith men entered the wilderness and by labor they conquered it. Once on these prairies God was a cloud by day and a fiery pillar by night. Here fortunes were wrecked as well as made. Here men gave up their lives that others might live. In the little army of sturdy pioneers, whose deeds I have set down in love, when any were cast down, religion consoled them and when pride came with success they felt what the author of Robert Elsmere calls "that fierce self-judgment of the good-the most stirring and humbling thing in life."
When Pella had become a prosperous community, Rev. Cohen Stuart, one of the learned men of Holland, came bearing the greetings of the king and his acknowledgment that these people had been maltreated in their own country under his predecessors. But kings and petty magistrates had long before been forgiven, and almost forgotten in the joys of American citizenship. Time effaces the memory even of offenses and time brings also the comforting conviction that "offenses must needs come." All history, in a sense, teaches the predestination of nations. If events are not determined from the first, at least the end is determined by the beginning. The sea and its wrath, the Rhine which overflowed its banks in the spring or when the wind blew on the sea, Caesar and Charlemagne and the Spaniard, the bulls of the popes and the fagots and torches of the Inquisition-all seem to have been of the purposes of history, if not of the Providence of God. They made a hardy race, whose commerce and whose colonies belted the earth and whose navies ruled the seas before England became great; a race of men who governed themselves when America was still a dream of colonization and a scene of European plunder, men who maintained against all the world that "at least the consciences of men ought to be free," and that "religion is ever a matter between the individual and his God." On nine thousand square miles of land, that had once been swept by the sea, European history was focused for a whole century. There "the purest of the Teutons"-and Motley says they were also the bravest-governed themselves, resisted the feudalism of the Middle Ages. tolerated no lords, temporal or spiritual, worshipped God according to the dictates of their own consciences, though the price was an eighty-year war, painted pictures whose renown still fills the earth, printed books, made many inventions, grew rich, and then ceased to be great.
But if Holland in Europe declined, Holland in America-of which Pella is only a later bit-has grown greater and brighter as modern historical research is giving it recognition. American history is no longer written in the shadow of European royalty, but in the light of European republicanism. We are going back to first things, "and in many respects," says William Elliot Griffis, who investigated this matter for the Boston Congregational Club, "Holland is the land of first things in modern Christian civilization." The Hollanders had the first common schools in Europe. They had consumed twenty-four editions of the New Testament and fifteen of the whole bible before there was a bible printed in England. And when Tyndale's Bible came, bearing light for this world and the world to come, it was printed by Hollanders and smuggled into England. Hallam says that in Holland "self-government goes beyond any assignable date." Taine says that when Shakespeare was writing. "the Dutch were two centuries ahead of the rest of Europe," as great on the sea and in the world as England was in the time of Napoleon. Motley says that they were "the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe." The Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1580, the Magna Charta of 1688 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776, Mr. Griffis