You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Dominic. America is a young country, but 1620 seems a long time ago. That was when facing life in a Europe where a 30-year religious war had just begun,

one that would in time upend the lives of subjects and monarchs alike.

The pilgrims, a mix of desperate and abused religious outcasts, decided to head west.

They would leave the old world behind and take their families to the new. The journey was

fraught with danger. One disaster after another almost prevented them from making this errand into the

wilderness, as Samuel Danforth would preach a half a century later. They arrived not to find a land of

milk and honey, but one experiencing a harsh epidemic, a terrible plague, and they came unprepared for the ravages of a northern winter.

102 souls came on the Mayflower.

By the spring, half of them would be dead.

Yet today, their children and grandchildren number in the tens of millions.

Patriots today are proud to trace their heritage back to such men and women, the closest thing we have to American royalty.

As the great Calvin Coolidge said in his speech marking the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrim's arrival at Plymouth Rock,

they came not merely from the shores of the old world. It will be in vain

to search among recorded maps and history for their origin. They sailed up out of the infinite.

There was among them small trace of the vanities of life. They came undecched with orders of nobility.

They were not children of fortune, but of tribulation.

Persecution, not preference, brought them hither, but it was a persecution in which they found

a stern satisfaction.

They cared little for titles, still less for the goods of this earth, but for an idea

they would die. Measured by the standards of men of this earth, but for an idea they would die.

Measureed by the standards of men of their time, they were the humble of the earth.

Measureed by later accomplishments, they were the mighty.

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