After five weeks of careful inspection of the coast they selected for their colony a spot which Captain John Smith had already named Plymouth, in honor of the lovely harbor from which they had sailed. Here, as tradition says, upon a great rock, now known throughout the world as Plymouth Rock, they landed on December 21, plowed through the deep snow, and amid the “murmuring pines and the hemlocks” began to build a House of God and about it rude cabins of logs. To this scene every true American heart should turn with reverence, whatever his creed, political affiliation, or sectional tradition; for it, more than any other in American colonial history, typifies the spirit which has made of America a great nation. At Plymouth, more even than at Jamestown, the political doctrines which had grown out of Calvinistic theology took firm root. In religion the Puritans were bigoted and intolerant; but in political theories they represented the idea of the freedom and dignity of the individual. The God-given right of self-government was their political motto, and from it they never swerved. The great contest which we call the American Revolution was not, as is sometimes asserted, an attempt to throw off the shackles of tyranny, but was, on the contrary, a determined refusal to allow these shackles to be put on. George the Third and his obsequious minister, Lord North, were the real revolutionists; for they sought to take away from the American colonies rights of self-government as old as Jamestown and Plymouth. In this they failed, and their failure cost England an empire. [Illustration: PLAN OF FORT TICONDEROGA _A restoration begun in 1909. The first fort, called Fort Carillon, was built by the French in 1755. It was taken by the British in 1758 and rebuilt as Fort Ticonderoga._] TICONDEROGA AND INDEPENDENCE HALL [Illustration: THE ETHAN ALLEN HOUSE _An inn at Dorset, Vermont, where the Revolutionary hero used to stop._] [Illustration: TABLET AT TICONDEROGA _On this rock are the names of Ticonderoga’s heroes, Champlain, Montcalm, Lord Howe, Amherst and Burgoyne._]