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the idea of the gentleman. The towns taught the dignity of labor and the service of honest trade. The long struggle for liberty gave men an ideal of life as free and responsible-free, “I am the captain of my soul"; responsible, for "no one liveth unto himself"; we are members one of another. Such liberty and responsibility are two of the great factors in democracy.

PART II

LIBERTY, UNION, DEMOCRACY IN THE NEW

WORLD

T

CHAPTER XV

NEW FORCES AND NEW TASKS

tunity

HE first steps toward union, freedom, and democ- America racy had been taken, as we have seen, long spells before America was settled or even discovered. opporProgress along all these lines continued in Europe. Nevertheless the struggle for liberty in the Old World was hard and often discouraging. Beginning with the Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower to Plymouth in 1620, multitudes from all the countries of Europe came to America to find here a land of freedom, a land of opportunity. Sometimes it was religious freedom that they sought. This was the case with many of the first emigrants from England in the years 1620-40. Sometimes it was the opportunity to have land and homes of their own, with greater opportunity to work out their own lives. This seems to have brought many of the Scotch-Irish a century later. Sometimes it was political liberty that was most prominent, as with the Germans who came in 1848. Frequently it has been several motives combined. In the Old World the power of kings and nobility was tenacious; the division between gentry and common folk was firmly fixed and only rarely could a man of lower class break over this division. The land was nearly all owned by the gentry. Laws often favored the ruling class. Religion was controlled in many ways by the government. In England, after the time of Henry VIII, the king was head of the church. At the time when the early settlers

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