That the ideal should be final is of small consequence. It matters little whether it is a religious tenet, a mode of worship, a method of life, or a state of society. The essential thing is that it stands apart from the appetites, passions, and petty aims that govern most of us. Those who will face panther and tomahawk for the sake of their ideal are not to be swayed by the sordid motives and fitful passions that lord it over commonplace lives. Holding themselves to be instruments for the fulfilment of some larger purpose, men of this type make their mark upon the world. The fathers dedicate themselves to establishing godliness in the community. Their posterity fly to arms in behalf of the principle of "No taxation without representation." _Their_ posterity, in turn, war upon the liquor traffic, slavery, or imperialism. As surely as one quarter of us are still of the blood of the twenty thousand Puritans who sought the wilderness between 1618 and 1640, so surely are there ideals not yet risen above the horizon that will inspire Americans in the generations to come. The Dutch settled New Amsterdam from practical motives, although some of them were Walloons fleeing oppression in the Spanish Netherlands. Gain prompted the peopling of Virginia, and that colony received its share of human chaff. The Council of Virginia early complained that "it hurteth to suffer Parents to disburden themselves of lascivious sonnes, masters of bad servants and wives of ill husbands, and so clogge the business with such an idle crue, as did thrust themselves in the last voiage, that will rather starve for hunger, than lay their hands to labor." [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Immigrant Women in Line for Inspection at Ellis Island] In 1637 the collector of the port of London averred that "most of those that go thither ordinarily have no habitation ... and are better out than within the kingdom." After the execution of Charles I, a number of Royalist families removed to Virginia rather than brook the rule of Cromwell. This influx of the well-to-do registers itself in an abrupt increase in the size of the land-grants and in a sudden rise in the number of slaves. From this period one meets with the names of Randolph, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall, Washington and many others that have become household words. On the whole, however, the exodus of noble "Cavaliers" to Virginia is a myth; for it is now generally admitted that the aristocracy of eighteenth-century Virginia sprang chiefly from "members of the country gentry, merchants and tradesmen and their sons and relatives, and occasionally a minister, a physician, a lawyer, or a captain in the merchant service," fleeing political troubles at home or tempted by the fortunes to be made in tobacco.