For the democracy of America had its first articulate voicing in the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans of New England. These men and women, devoted to the literature of the Old Testament, and upheld by the ancestral memories of the Jews, were moved to undertake their great American adventure by the ideal of nationality. It was not because of an overwhelming oppression of body and soul that the Pilgrims adventured to America. It was not "freedom to worship God" that they sought. They had that in Holland. They sought freedom to be themselves, to realize their national genius in their own individual way. Their English manners, English speech, English history, and English loyalty were, in fact, more important to them than their Hebrew Bible. They used that as the spiritual pabulum which nourished their English corporate life. Their Calvinism was a reinterpretation of its prophetic nationalism expressed in the doctrine of the "chosen people"; their political institutions were a modification of the ideal political order it was supposed to reveal. As Cotton Mather narrates, his grandfather, John Cotton, found, on his arrival in New England, that the population was much exercised over the framing of a "civil constitution." They turned to him for help, begging "that he would, from the laws wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an abstract of such as were of a moral and lasting equity." So "he propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel." Out of this beginning the democratic mood of America surges; in such conceptions the ideals which express the mood have their origins. These ideals are the conservation of nationality, and the equality of men before the inconceivable supremacy of their God. Hebraism and English nationality--these are the spiritual background of the American commonwealth. Political freedom in America has tended to generate self-expression of each national group, and our country is to-day, broadly speaking, a great coöperative commonwealth of nationalities, British, French, German, Slavic, Jewish, each freely developing, in so far as it is self-conscious, its national genius, its language, literature and art in its own characteristic way as its best contribution to the civilization of America as a whole,[C] realizing in this way the ideal of the democracy of nationalities, of international comity and coöperation which our prophets were the first to formulate.