Glancing at the history of the arbitrary and cruel measures taken to prevent the departure of the congregation, which finally, in broken detachments, distressed, despoiled, imperilled by land and sea, assembled at Amsterdam, moving thence to Leyden, Mr. Bayard paid grateful recognition to the country which, in their hour of sore need, extended to exiles welcome protection and generous toleration in an age of intolerance, and recited the familiar incidents connected with their sailing for America. "It is clear and plain to us now that the departure from England of this small body of humble men was a great step in the march of Christian civilisation. It contained the seed of Christian liberty, freedom of enquiry, freedom of man's conscience." As for John Robinson, between whose grave and the colony he was the means of planting, washes the wide ocean he never crossed. His memory is a tie of kindred--a recognition of the common trust committed to both nations to sustain the principles of civil and religious liberty of which he was a fearless champion, and under which he has so marvellously fulfilled the prophesy "A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a great nation." And the seed of Christian liberty, sown in adversity but on good soil, has become a wide-spreading tree in whose sheltering branches all who will may lodge. Six years after this stone-laying, in June, 1902, the tercentenary of the founding of the Gainsborough church, a tablet was unveiled in the vestibule of the new building to commemorate the world-wide co-operation in honouring one "the thought of whom stirs equal reverence in English and American hearts." What the American Ambassador so well said at Gainsborough was a fitting prelude to the excursion which his countrymen, continuing their itinerary, made to the Pilgrim scenes in Holland where, in 1891, the English Plymouth memorial year, they had erected on St. Peter's Cathedral at Leyden, under which lie his bones, a tablet to John Robinson, pastor of the English church worshipping "over against this spot," whence at his prompting went forth the Pilgrim Fathers to settle New England. [Illustration: DESIGN BY R. M. LUCAS FOR THE TERCENTENARY MEMORIAL AT SOUTHAMPTON, TO BE UNVEILED ON AUGUST 15TH, 1912] The Gainsborough ceremony and the visits to Plymouth and Boston forged further links in the chain of sympathy and brotherhood between England and America. Fresh evidence has since been forthcoming that the religious zeal and love of manly independence which induced the Mayflower Pilgrims to expatriate themselves and found a mighty empire across the Atlantic have their abiding influence to-day. We have seen how these New World pilgrimages to Old World shrines rekindled dormant affections on both sides.[13] No doubt the journeys will be renewed again and again over much the same ground in the days to come.