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sought to strangle the liberties of the English people, or Richelieu, as he then sought to build up a kingly despotism, appreciate that even then a little group of carders, weavers and farmers of England were founding a colony in an unbroken wilderness, from whose vigorous loins would spring a mighty Republic, which should dominate the world when the Stuarts and the Bourbons were alike forgotten! The importance of the central incident of the famous voyage, when those sturdy English yeomen met in the cabin of the "Mayflower" and created of themselves a "civil body politic" has sometimes been exaggerated. The rocking cabin of the "Mayflower" was not the cradle of democracy. There were brave men before Agamemnon, and similarly there were sturdy champions of popular rights long before the famous compact. Indeed, it should not require this gracious season of Christmas time to remind us that the true cradle of democracy was the manger at Bethlehem. When the son of a Nazareth carpenter brought to the world the gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man he ennobled the individual, destroyed the spirit of caste and made democracy in its broadest and noblest sense inevitable.

It should also be remembered that the real vigor of our institutions is due not so much to the rule of the majority as to the restraints which our institutions place upon the power of the majority. Democracy has not destroyed the superstition of the divine right of kings in order to create another, almost as indefensible, of the divine right of majorities. It does not believe that the oil of anointing, which was supposed to consecrate the person and the acts of a king, has fallen upon the multitudinous tongue of the people and invested it with infallibility. In the evolution of American institutions, we have learned to make war against the tyranny of the many as well as that of the few. If the American Republic has enjoyed an unparalleled and almost miraculous growth, it is due not merely to the natural resources, with which God has endowed us as a people, but to the lofty spirit of individualism, which our written constitutions and unwritten laws have sought to conserve. While democracy recognizes that, as to certain measures for the common good, the will of the individual must be subordinated to that of the majority, yet, with this saving reserva-