"To a full appreciation of the supreme significance of the mighty event we to-day celebrate and its results--now constituting so inspiring a chapter of history--some account must be taken of conditions then existing in the mother country. While obtaining the guarantee of a large measure of self-government for the New World, Sir Edwin Sandys and his co-patriots were unable to secure that which even savored of liberal administration in the Old. James--the first of the Stuart Dynasty--was upon the English throne. In narrow, selfish state-craft his is possibly in the long list of sovereigns without a rival. The exercise and maintenance of royal prerogative was with him the 'be all and end all' of government, and, abetted by the sycophants about him, he unwittingly laid the train of inexorable events that were to culminate in the execution of one and the banishment of another of his line. His claim was that of absolute power, and during a reign of twenty-two years--extending from the death of Queen Elizabeth to the year 1625--he was the unrelenting foe of whatever pertained to freedom in religion or in government. His apparent indifference to the execution of his mother--the ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots--and his condemnation of the illustrious Sir Walter Raleigh to the scaffold, are alone sufficient to render the memory of this monarch forever infamous. It is a marvel, indeed, that with James the First upon the throne, and popular freedom in such a low state throughout his immediate realm, that so large a measure of liberty should have been conceded to the distant colony. The achievement is the enduring evidence of unsurpassed courage in the men in whose immediate keeping were the early fortunes of the Virginia colony, and sheds unfading lustre upon their memories. "Nor can it be forgotten that from the masterful hour that witnessed the assembling of the first House of Burgesses until the abdication of James the Second, the welfare of the Virginia colony was in large measure in the iron grasp of stern antagonists to all that pertained to liberty of conscience and to popular rule. Whatever there was of progress during the seventy years--barring the brief period of the Commonwealth--that immediately preceded the historic English Revolution, and the crowning of William and Mary, was despite the untiring hostility of the Stuart Dynasty. During this period the lives of Englishmen at home were as the dust in the balance. It witnessed the very heyday of the infamous Star Chamber. It was of Strafford, the bloody instrument (though wearing judicial ermine) of Charles the First, that Macaulay said: 'If justice, in the whole range of its wide armory, contained one weapon which could pierce him, that weapon his pursuers were bound, before God and man, to employ.' "And for all time, the Stuart Dynasty itself remains impaled by the pen of the same master: