was 15 and full of pluck) "Good people, what will ye?" Quickly, angrily rushes the answer-"We will that you free us and our lands forever, and that we never more be held in bondage." "I grant it!" shouts the King in a burst of useful, youthful enthusiasm, and no doubt at the moment he meant it. But neither he nor the world was yet ripe for Freedom. Again and again through the coming centuries Freedom must hide her face. DICK: (whispering to Freedom) "Say, ma'am, it's a great life if you don't weaken!" FREEDOM: (speaking exultantly) "Yes, it is a great life if you do not weaken. But he did weaken" Here the curtain falls, and the first act of "Freedom" called "England in the Making" ends. More than 500 years later, Robert Browning, thinking of these things-of the storied past of his country, of her far-flung lands, and ocean outposts, of her efforts and her sacrifices, of her daring and her tears-thinking of all he owed to his forefathers who helped "England in the Making," which is part of the making of Freedom, and an aid toward loving her, cries in "Home Thoughts From the Sea": "Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?" The English-speaking peoples of to-day have answered: "All we are, all we have, are yours— Freedom." ACT II AMERICA IN THE FINDING From "The First Voyage of Columbus," F theatrical performances lasted from six in the evening until six the following morning, it might be possible to present the salient episodes in The Struggle for Freedom among the Englishspeaking peoples. As theatrical performances should not last longer than two and a half hours, our play may be likened to a smart woman's jewels. Those she wears are merely a choice among the sparkling contents of her jewel-case. Some of the jewels of Freedom Dick and Hank have seen, and they have seen "England in The Making," that is in the act of restoring Freedom, for there must have been once a Golden Age, when men were free as the birds. From this we are fallen. No, in the fourteenth century England was not yet made, far from it; she has still much to learn, and much to forget, ere Freedom is won; but she has made a great beginning, and this her early history, clarified of dross and dregs, will be the basis of the Freedom that will arise, also through tribulation and passing failures, in the unknown land three thousand miles away. America is now to loom into the life of the world. A century or two and men will turn in Canning's words "to the New World to redress the balance of the Old." Who would have thought in those far-off days of Columbus that, in the year 1918, ancient France would present to the City of Philadelphia a magnificent piece of Gobelin tapestry showing troops departing from the Quaker City to fight for the Freedom of Europe, and that woven into the tapestry would be three statements from the lips of the President of the United States: "Right is more precious than peace." "We shall fight for Democracy." "We have no selfish end to serve and desire no conquest and no domination." To this New World, to America awaking to Europe, to the sight of Christopher Columbus crossing the empty seas, Freedom now takes the boys. But before following them we must glance, for a moment, at the period between the Peasants' Insurrection of 1381, with which Act I ended, and the year 1492 when Columbus, in a full suit of armor and bearing the flag of Spain (he did things in style, in the high Roman manner, like Shakespeare when he killed a calf), landed on one of the Bahama Islands and named it San Salvador, Holy Savior. Thinking he was in the East Indies, he called the natives Indians. things happen in this haphazard world. So During those one hundred and eleven years England had continued to-"muddle through," mixing bad and good, folly and fineness in her amalgam of progress. Man is a muddler, but he will win through because he must one day understand God. Man allowed himself to persecute the Lollards, followers of Wyclif, but the Lollards had learnt, as all followers of truth learn, that persecution is but a station of the Cross. There was trouble in Wales. The sturdy Welshmen, under Owen Glendower, a descendant of the native Princes, struck for independence-and failed; there was trouble in Southern England when twenty thousand yeomen and tradesmen, helped by esquires and gentlemen, and captained by Jack Cade, marched to Blackheath and demanded from the Royal Council redress of the |