From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth till the uprising against Charles First, about twenty thousand emigrants came from Old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the colonies in 1620 would have been accounted a deserter to leave after 1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave religious freedom to the people, sent Charles to the block, and committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the Supreme Executive authority of England. The English emigration was never renewed, and from these twenty thousand men with a small emigration from Scotland and from France are descended the vast numbers who have New England blood in their veins. In 1685 the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries four hundred thousand Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of French subjects--merchants of capital, skilled manufacturers and handicraftsmen, superior at the time to all others in Europe. A considerable number of these Huguenot French came to America, a few landed in New England and became honorably prominent in its history. Their names have in large part become anglicized, or have disappeared, but their blood is traceable in many of the most reputable families, and their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful institutions. From these two sources, the English-Puritan and the French-Huguenot, came the late President--his father, Abram Garfield, being descended from the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from the other. It was good stock on both sides--none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manliness, of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle. Garfield was proud of his blood, and, with as much satisfaction as if he were a British nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in Burke's Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in descent from the brave French Protestants who refused to submit to tyranny even from the Grand Monarque.