IV. THE PILGRIM FATHERS OF THE WEST.

On August 25th of last year, at Holland, Mich., a semicentennial celebration was held of the colonization of various parts of the Union, by emigrants from the Netherlands; but especially of the forming of the large colony on the shores of Macatawa Bay.

Says the Commission: "No immigrants, from whatever shores, have made a better record, in this country, during the present century, than from 'Brave little Holland.""

The movement began in 1847, and still the current flows, until it is estimated that over half a million of Hollanders are scattered, in smaller or larger colonies, from the Atlantic to the foot of the Rockies and even far beyond to the very shores of the Pacific.

Ever since Henry Hudson, the intrepid navigator, of English blood and Dutch affiliation and sympathies, in 1609, had discovered the Hudson River in his search of a N. W. passage to China, the thrifty Hollanders had looked to the American Continent, with a keen appreciation of its commercial possibilities, especially as regarded the fur-trade.

The "West India Company" was established, and New Amsterdam became the distributing point and centre of its enormously profitable American trade.

Hundreds of colonists, Dutch in the main, but also Walloon and of other nationalities, were carried across the seas, in the hope of bettering their condition and of securing a future for their descendants. These colonists established new centres of life and prosperity, and patterned closely after the Fatherland, in their civic and domestic establishments.

But in 1664 England laid its strong hand on the Dutch colonies, and the treaty of Breda, 1667, confirmed its possession, and thus the names New Netherlands and New Amsterdam became a memory and a tradition.

The Dutch tenacity of purpose, however, is shown by the fact that the earmarks of the Netherlands still abound, along

the Hudson and the Mohawk, where the language and the customs of the Fatherland, in an extremely untoward environment, were religiously perpetuated from generation to generation, till they died out only in the first half of this century. Meanwhile the great Indian pelagic possessions of the Dutch and South Africa had absorbed the rivulet of emigration.

Then came the mighty changes in the Netherlands, which prepared the way for the exodus of 1847 and subsequent years.

England slowly absorbed the royal trade of the Netherlands, the power of the Dutch Republic was waning, the old inspiration had vanished, and in 1795 the fabric of the commonwealth melted away. Ever since the great ecclesiastico-political struggle of the early days of the 17th century, the centrifugal and centripetal forces in the Union had been at war, with the inevitable result of slowly but steadily undermining the foundations of the proud burgher-Republic.

The revolution of 1795 cleft the mystic tie between the House of Orange and the Netherlands. Old landmarks were buried out of sight and old principles were scorned and trampled in the dust. A brief dream of absolute liberty, a withering intoxication with French maxims and ideas, and the strong heel of Napoleon had crushed out the life of the short lived "Batavian Republic" and embodied it in the voracious empire. For the kingdom of Louis Bonaparte had been but a fiction of independence. One of the ministers of the Emperor, Fouchè, had stated the matter correctly, when he said: "the Emperor considers the countries, which he has given to his brothers, as belonging to the French Empire. He was willing that they should bear the title of kings, but simply in order that they might govern according to his, not their own will." Indescribable misery was endured by Holland under the French regime, especially through its close relations with England. In the vortex of the revolution the country had lost its grasp on the former order of things; a counter-revolution must therefore establish something entirely new. This new thing was created, when William V. of Orange was re

called from England in 1813, and as William I. was crowned as Holland's first king. But William had not been abroad in vain, and both kings and subjects had obtained new ideas in the revolution. One of the first things he undertook to do, was the reorganization of the Dutch Church, which in the 16th century had given birth to the Republic. The Dutch reformation had been at the same time a revolution; the free Church in the Netherlands existed before the free State. This Church had been intensely democratic, its government had been representative from the lowest to the highest bodies. The power, which the government exercised over it, had been coöperative rather than regulative, paternal rather than coercive. The Stadholders and Regents exercised only such supervisionary functions in it, as were the legitimate outcome of the historic relation between the Church and the State. In her own sphere the Church had been claimed to be absolutely free and sovereign. At a stroke of the pen all this was changed. William's ideal was the reorganization of the Dutch Church after the pattern of the Anglican Church, with the sovereign as its practical head. All the representative bodies of the Church were set aside and replaced by appropriate Boards or "Bestwein," and the idea of popular representation, by regular ecclesiastical appointment, was utterly banished from the new organization, whilst the old test for entering the ministry was changed. Any one acquainted with the history of the Netherlands, in which Church and State are so inseparably interwoven, will readily perceive the ruinousness of this high-handed proceeding. In the end it occasioned the Free Church of Holland.

The life of the Dutch Church moved on a low plane, when the trumpet blasts of Cesar Malan of Geneva, himself set on fire by the Methodistical movements in England, resounded through the Netherlands in 1832. Holland was swept in line with the "great revival." Men of international fame, like Groen Van Prinsterer, Bilderdyh, Da Costa and others were deeply stirred by it, and in the University of Leyden it acted

An old

like a hot blast on a small coterie of men of intense convictions and great force of character. And when the natural leaders recoiled from the logical consequences of the movement, these young men lifted high the banner of the old Church and the old doctrine, for which the fathers had bled, and the Free Church of Holland was born in 1834. Among these courageous spirits were A. C. Van Raalte and H. P. Schotte, who were destined to become the leaders of the new exodus to America. But between those years of 1834 and 1847 lie the horrors of a relentless persecution. The government tried to thwart and coerce the new movement. Napoleonic code against secret societies, forbidding more than nineteen people to meet in any given place, unrepealed because of its perfect uselessness, was unearthed and applied to the Seceders; and on this anachronism a bitter and shameful persecution was founded. The adherents of the new movement were fined and imprisoned, dragonnaded and mobbed, their meetings were rudely dispersed, sometimes with bloodshed, their preachers were hounded and incarcerated like the vilest criminals. Thus Holland, whose name once had been a synonym for religious liberty, in the 19th century, persecuted her sons and daughters, for adhering to the very faith, for which the war of independence had been waged during eighty weary

years.

Meanwhile a dreadful commercial paralysis smote the country. Business of every description stagnated, work was scarce and ill paid, capital lay idle, confidence was destroyed, and a general condition of "malaise" prevailed; when the cup, already dangerously full, ran over by the blight of a double national calamity-the "rinderpest" and the "potato-rot," and thus the fever of expatriation set in.

For eleven years Van Raalte had borne the heat and burden of the day, and he had emptied the cup of persecution to the very dregs, when he was stricken with the deadly typhus. In his delirium he was ever occupied with the startling condition of affairs in Church and State, and in his lucid intervals he

vowed that, should he get well, he would lead those, who would follow him, across the sea. People were desperate, but whither? To South Africa? But the journey was long and the conditions there far from propitious. To Batavia? But the same religious intolerance would follow them to the "pearl of the Indian Ocean," from which they sought deliverance at home. And thus the pilgrims turned their faces westward, and the American emigration was a "fait accompli."

Look for a minute at its chief leader-a man short of stature but well proportioned and of commanding aspect; with an uncommon expanse of forehead; clear gray-blue eyes of wonderful expressiveness; a smile, which was a revelation; lips firm and full of decision, nose prominent, chin indicative of strength of character; a man once seen never to be forgotten, a man of rare powers of eloquence, of brilliant education, of great administrative ability and rare organizing talent; a man among a thousand, specially and providentially fitted for his great life-work. Such was Albertus C. Van Raalte. What Robinson was to the Leyden pilgrims, that and far more than that Van Raalte was to the pilgrims of 1846. In September of that year he set sail, with his immediate followers, in a small sailing vessel, variously named in the documents "the Sultane" and "the Southerner," and on the 17th of November they reached New York, where the pilgrims, whose history was well known in America, were warmly welcomed by members of the Reformed Dutch Church, among whom Drs. De Witt of New York and Wyckoff of Albany and elder Forrester were most prominent. And now the wide Western world lay before them. It is almost inconceivable what changes the last fifty years have wrought on this continent. The "WEST" in 1847 had still an ominous sound, in which the rustle and roar of the mighty forests, the breath of the prairies, the thunderous hoof-beat of the lordly buffalo, and the wild Indian war-whoop were strangely blended. Van Raalte had carefully studied the situation and had selected the woodlands of Eastern Wisconsin as a place of settlement. But even in New York this