It was
the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in
his election sermon of 1688: "God sifted a whole nation, that He might
send choice grain into the wilderness." [Sidenote: Respectable character
of the emigration]
This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect
that the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty
years increased to something like 15,000,000. From these men have come
at least one-fourth of the present population of the United States.
Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the
fact of the original migration when duly considered. In these times,
when great steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing
immigrants to a country not less advanced in material civilization
than the country which they leave, the daily arrival of a thousand new
citizens has come to be a commonplace event. But in the seventeenth
century the transfer of more than twenty thousand well-to-do people
within twenty years from their comfortable homes in England to the
American wilderness was by no means a commonplace event. It reminds one
of the migrations of ancient peoples, and in the quaint thought of
our forefathers it was aptly likened to the exodus of Israel from the
Egyptian house of bondage.
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