Almost instinctively the minds of the British people turned to the day, nearly three hundred years before, when the _Mayflower_ sailed for the wilderness beyond the seas. The moving picture film, which depicted the arrival of our first destroyer division, and which was exhibited all over Great Britain to enthusiastic crowds, cleverly accentuated this idea. This film related how, in 1620, a few Englishmen had landed in North America; how these adventurers had laid the foundations of a new state based on English conceptions of justice and liberty; how they had grown great and prosperous; how the stupidity of certain British statesmen had forced them to declare their independence; how they had fought for this independence with the utmost heroism; how out of these disjointed British colonies they had founded one of the mightiest nations of history; and how now, when the liberties of mankind were endangered, the descendants of the old _Mayflower_ pioneers had in their turn crossed the ocean--this time going eastward--to fight for the traditions of their race. Had Americans been making this film, they would have illustrated another famous episode in our history that antedated, by thirteen years, the voyage of the _Mayflower_--that is, the landing of British colonists in Virginia, in 1607; but in the minds of the English people the name _Mayflower_ had become merely a symbol of American progress and all that it represented. This whole story appealed to the British masses as one of the great miracles of history--a single, miserable little settlement in Massachusetts Bay expanding into a continent overflowing with resources and wealth; a shipload of men, women, and children developing, in less than three centuries, into a nation of more than 100,000,000 people. And the arrival of our destroyers, pictured on the film, informed the British people that all this youth and energy had been thrown upon their side of the battle.