It was in the midst of this intense intellectual ferment, and as the result of it, that the settlement of our country began. While the Church of England had emancipated itself from the Papal power at immense cost of life and treasure, and after generations of conflict, it had not learned the great law of religious freedom. Our forefathers made war on the divine right of bishops, and the authority of the church to control their consciences, and were driven by persecution to America. Here they prospered, were subject to Great Britain, and for a time were contented. But when in America they were denied the rights granted to Englishmen living in England, their discontent became general, and the Declaration of Independence and the War of the Revolution followed. They were not hot-headed philosophers, crazed by the theories of the French revolution, as many to-day would have us believe. The “glittering generalities” of the Declaration of Independence, as Rufus Choate sneeringly called the immortal principles of our great charter of liberty, were not deductions from Rousseau, Voltaire, or any other French philosopher. They were simply the reiteration of the rights of English citizenship, expanded and adapted to the exigencies of the new world in which the colonists had planted themselves. For the American civilization is only a continuation of the English civilization, under new conditions—some of them more favorable, and others less so. Before there was a revolution in France, or a democracy in France, Jefferson’s most democratic words had been spoken in America. And all the facts go to show that if there was any learning from each other in political science, between him and the French philosophers, they were the pupils, and not Jefferson. They were men of untarnished moral character; religion and patriotism were to them synonymous terms, and their love of liberty developed into a passion. The world has never seen grander, more versatile, nor more self-poised men, than the founders of our nation. What of the women associated with these heroes? “The ammunition of the Continental soldiery in the war for freedom came from the pulpit, and the farmer’s fireside,” said one of the orators on a recent centennial occasion. The men of the Revolution had no cowardly, faint-hearted mothers and wives to hang about their neck like millstones. Their women were as heroic in fiber as themselves. Patriotic mothers nursed the infancy of freedom. They talked with their children of the wrongs of the people, and of their invaded rights, and uttered their aspirations for a better state of things in language of intensest force. Sons and daughters grew sensitive to the tyranny that oppressed their parents, and as they came to maturity burned with a desire to defend their rights to the utmost.