" More than fifty years have passed since that war rearmed
the binding force of the Constitution and apparently sealed the
perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social
changes now in progress are serving to show that the United
States has its full share of the anxieties which beset all human
institutions in this daily altering world.
"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said
Roger Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort, the
perishable nature of human institutions, was quick in the
consciousness of the gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan
citizens who emigrated from England to the New World. It had been
a familiar note in the poetry of that Elizabethan period which
had followed with such breathless interest the exploration of
America. It was a conception which could be shared alike by a
saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John Smith.
Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow they
have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners,
as all our fathers were.
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