So far the story is quite like that of prosperous people in the old country. The difference lies in the fact that when this old Boston worthy had made his fortune he found himself in a society where there was neither a nobility nor a landed gentry to deprive him of social distinction. The state of personal feeling which ensued, familiar throughout American history, was different from what any man of just this class has generally felt in England, and more like that of the grander merchants of Venice. As a prosperous man of affairs, he felt all the unquestioning sense of personal dignity which everywhere marks the condition of a gentleman. Superficially, perhaps in consequence, his manners seem to have become rather more like those of fashionable England than had been common in earlier America. A fragment from a letter addressed him during the Revolution by the minister of the church where he was for years a deacon will tell something of his temper. The reverend gentleman was travelling in the Middle States, where he had been impressed by the Moravian settlement at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and he commented on it as follows:

"The Nunnery, as they call it, is an object of curiosity. A picture of diligence, but as I could not but observe, much to the ruining of their health & to the destruction of the social disposition. About sixty or more girls kept entirely to work without any recreation or amusement & without any intercourse with men, under the strict orders of an Old Maid Governess. Judge how miserable must be their condition! - Their complexions are sallow, & discontentment is painted on every countenance. More ordinary people I never saw. A remark struck me when I heard an Old Man praise the conduct of our soldiers when they were in Bethlehem. He said there was no one instance where they attempted the chastity of their women, which I could impute to another cause besides their love of virtue. For No woman need have against a Man any other armour than her ugliness, & the Girls at Bethlehem are well equipped with this Coat of Mail."

It is doubtful whether such words would have been apt to proceed in eighteenth-century England from a devout dissenting minister to a bell-wether of his flock. They read more like

the correspondence of men of the world.

The Revolution

destroyed the fortunes and the social leadership of this class. To find such people again in America, we must probably wait until after the Civil War.

But, after all, this development of a small class into full contemporary vigour did not much affect what is often called the bone and the sinew of the American commonwealth, nor indeed did it result in any serious social breach. Our mercantile aristocracy was not hereditary; if fortune failed, its members reverted almost immediately to the sound old native type, and able people were continually making their way into that fortunate class whose prosperity the Revolution brought to an end.

Meanwhile throughout the first half of our eighteenth century, external affairs constantly took a pretty definite form. Increased commercial prosperity and superficial social changes could not alter the fact that until the conquest of Canada the English colonies in America were constantly menaced by disturbances which Yankee tradition still calls the French and

Indian wars. These began before the seventeenth century closed. In 1690 Sir William Phips captured Port Royal, now Annapolis, in Nova Scotia; later in the year he came to grief in an expedition against Quebec itself; in 1704 came the still remembered sack of Deerfield in the Connecticut valley; in 1745 came Sir William Pepperell's somewhat fortuitous conquest of Louisbourg; in 1755 came Braddock's defeat; in 1759 came Wolfe's final conquest at Quebec. The whole story is excellently told in the works of Francis Parkman. As we have seen before, these really record the struggle which decided the future of America. When the eighteenth century began, — as the encircling names of Quebec, Montreal, Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans may still remind us,— it was doubtful whether the continent which is now the United States should ultimately be controlled by the traditions of England or by those of continental Europe. Throughout

the first half of the eighteenth century this question was still in doubt, never more so, perhaps, than when Braddock fell in what is now Western Pennsylvania. The victory on the Plains of Abraham settled the fate of a hemisphere. Once for all, the continent of America passed into the control of the race which still maintains there the traditions of the English Law.

As

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, there declared itself throughout British America a movement which throws a good deal of light on American temperament. we saw in our glance at English literature, one of the writers still busy in 1750 was John Wesley, the founder of that great dissenting sect commonly called Methodist. This originated in a fervent evangelical protest against the corrupt, unspiritualised condition of the English Church during the reign of George II. Though Methodism made permanent impression on the middle class of England, however, it can hardly be regarded in England as a social force of the first historical importance. Nor were any of its manifestations there salient enough to attract the instant attention of people who consider general English history. In America the case was different. During the earlier years of the eighteenth century the Puritan churches had begun to stiffen into formalism. Though this never went so far as to divorce religion from life, or to let native Yankees long forget the main tenets of Calvinism, there was such decline of religious fervour as to give the more earnest clergy serious ground for alarm.

In 1738 George Whitefield, perhaps the most powerful of English revivalists, first visited the colonies. In that year he devoted himself to the spiritual awakening of Georgia. In 1740 he came to New England. The Great Awakening of religion during the next few years was largely due to his preaching. At first the clergy were disposed ardently to welcome this revival of religious enthusiasm. Soon, however, the revival took a turn of which we may best form a conception

by supposing that half the respectable classes of New England should fervently abandon their earthly affairs, and, enrolling themselves under the banners of the Salvation Army, should proceed to camp-meetings of the most enthusiastic disorder.

The more conservative clergy were alarmed; in 1744 Harvard College formally protested against the excesses of Whitefield, and in 1745 Yale followed this example. The religious enthusiasm which possessed the lower classes of eighteenth-century America, in short, grotesquely outran the gravely passionate ecstasies of the immigrant Puritans. So late as Cotton Mather's time, the devout of New England were still rewarded with mystic visions, wherein divine voices and heavenly figures revealed themselves to prayerful keepers of fasts and vigils. The Great Awakening which expressed itself in mad shoutings and tearing off of garments was more like what the earlier Puritans had deemed the diabolical excesses of Quakerism. The personal contrast between the immigrant Puritans and Whitefield typifies the difference. The old ministers had entered on their duties with all the authority of scholars from English universities; Whitefield began his career as an inspired potboy who emerged from a tavern of the lower kind. Seventeenth-century Puritanism was a profound and lasting spiritual power; Whitefield's revival was rather an outburst of ranting excess. Yet for all this excess the Great Awakening testifies to one lasting fact, — a far-reaching spontaneity and enthusiasm among the humble classes of America, which, once aroused, could produce social phenomena much more startling than Methodism produced in King George II.'s England.

The people who had been so profoundly stirred by this Great Awakening were the same who in 1776 declared themselves independent of the mother country. The American Revolution is important enough for separate consideration. Before speaking of that, we had best consider the literary expression of America up to 1776. Here, then, we need only

recall a few dates. The Stamp Act was passed in 1765, the year in which Blackstone published the first volume of his "Commentaries on the Law of England." Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill came in 1775, the year in which Burke delivered his masterly speech on "Conciliation with America." On the Glorious Fourth of July, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. American independence was finally acknowledged by the peace of 1783. The Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789. In 1800 the presidency of John Adams was drawing to a close, and Washington was dead. Now, very broadly speaking, the forces which expressed themselves in these familiar facts were forces which tended in America to destroy the mercantile class whom Copley painted, and to substitute as the ruling class throughout the country one more like that which had been stirred by the Great Awakening. In other words, the Revolution once more brought to the surface of American life the sort of natives whom the Great Awakening shows so fully to have preserved the spontaneity and the enthusiasm of earlier days. A trifling anecdote may perhaps define this somewhat vague generalisation. In the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston is a room which contains a number of portraits by Copley, representing the mercantile aristocracy of the town. a few years before the American Revolution. To this room, not long ago, there chanced to stray a gentleman eminent in the political and social life of a modern English colony. A shrewd man, of wide experience, he had found the United States a little puzzling. The sight of these Copley portraits was to him as a burst of light. He laughed, and pointing to the wall which their dignity adorns, exclaimed: "Why, that's the sort of people we are!" The sort of people whom Copley painted, in short, still socially and politically control the British colonies. Except for the Revolution, they might still have controlled America.

During the eighteenth century, then, America seems slowly