It is idle to speculate upon hypothetical theories in the face of the facts of history. Of course, America would have been discovered and colonized had Columbus never lived; but had the streams of the beginnings of American history flown from other sources in other directions, it would be futile even to make an imaginative forecast of the effect they would have produced upon the history and development of this Continent. The merciless intolerance of an ecclesiastical system and the horror of its persecutions stimulated the earliest immigration, and subsequently brought about the Reformation in Saxon and Anglo-Saxon lands, and the same spirit drove to our shores the Pilgrim and the Puritan fathers; which chain of circumstances destined this country from the very beginning to be the land of the immigrant and a home for the fugitive and the persecuted. The difference between government by kings and nobles and government under a Democracy is, that the former rests upon the power to compel obedience, while the latter rests essentially upon the sacrifice by the individual for the community, based upon the ideals of right and justice. If the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Huguenots brought with them, as they certainly did, the remembrance of sufferings for ideals and the spirit of sacrifice, how much longer was that remembrance, and with how much greater intensity did that spirit glow in the souls of the Jews, whose whole history is a record of martyrdom, of suffering, and of sacrifice for the ideals of civil and religious liberty; concerning whom it has been said: “Of all the races and nations of mankind which quarter the arms of Liberty on the shields of their honor, none has a better title to that decoration than the Jews.” The spirit of Judaism became the mother spirit of Puritanism in Old England; and the history of Israel and its democratic model under the Judges inspired and guided the Pilgrims and the Puritans in their wandering hither and in laying the foundation of their commonwealths in New England. The piety and learning of the Jews bridged the chasm of the Middle Ages; and the torch they bore amidst trials and sufferings lighted the pathway from the ancient to the modern world.