John Winthrop First Governor of the Masschusetts Colony

THE LITTLE SPEECH. 1 1
humble day the vital operation of the life-principle of
the better future we behold because it is seen encumbered
with excrescences from the past; who
[disparage our fathers because, while blazing the trail
of freedom, they did not lay a course for it that
required no subsequent correction, and make it a
macadamized road ; in whose regard their merit,
wherein they were in advance of their time, is can-
celled by the fact that in some points they were men
of their time who in their case ;
put aside the rule that
" we are to judge the actions of men by the light we
have, but men by the light they have," — will have
little difficulty in maintaining a slighting and even
contemptuous opinion of the Puritan age
in Massa-
chusetts. They who think otherwise, will have as
little in reading in the tale of those years, " in which
the strongest race that Massachusetts will ever see,
grew up on her lean soil," a shining chapter in the
evolution of those causes " which have shifted the
world's political centre of gravity from the Mediter-
ranean and the Rhine to the Atlantic and the Mississippi,
from the men who spoke Latin to the men
who speak English." 1
And to such, the Puritan chief who delivered the
Little Speech in the meeting-house
at Boston will be
accounted one of the princes of our civilization.
1 Beginnings of New England, John Fiske, p. 50.