XV. plies; Prussia and Austria were alarmed; Spain openly CHAP. threatened, and Charles II. consented to treaties. All conquests were to be restored; and Holland, which 1674. had been the first to claim the enfranchisement of the oceans, against its present interests, established by compact the rights of neutral flags. In a work dedicated to all the princes and nations of Christendom, and addressed to the common intelligence of the civilized world, the admirable Grotius, contending that right and wrong are not the evanescent expressions of fluctuating opinions, but are endowed with an immortality of their own, had established the freedom of the seas on an imperishable foundation. Ideas once generated live forever. With the recognition of maritime liberty, Holland disappears from our history; when, after the lapse of more than a century, this principle comes in jeopardy, Holland, the mother of four of our states, will rise up as our ally, bequeathing to the new federal republic the defence of commercial freedom which she had vindicated against Spain, and for which we shall see her prosperity fall a victim to England. 31. On the final transfer of New Netherlands to Eng- Oct. land, after a military occupation of fifteen months by the Dutch, the brother of Charles II. resumed the possession of New York, and Carteret appears once more as proprietary of the eastern moiety of New Jersey; but the banks of the Delaware were reserved for men who had been taught by the uneducated son of a poor Leicestershire weaver to seek the principle of God in their own hearts, and to build the city of humanity by obeying the nobler instincts of human nature. 326 CHAPTER XVI. THE PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES. CHAP. THE nobler instincts of humanity are the same in every age and in every breast. The exalted hopes, that have dignified former generations of men, will be renewed as long as the human heart shall throb. The visions of Plato are but revived in the dreams of Sir Thomas More. A spiritual unity binds together every member of the human family; and every heart contains an incorruptible seed, capable of springing up and producing all that man can know of God, and duty, and the soul. An inward voice, uncreated by schools, independent of refinement, opens to the unlettered hind, not less than to the polished scholar, a sure pathway into the enfranchisements of immortal truth. This is the faith of the people called QUAKERS. A moral principle is tested by the attempt to reduce it to practice. The history of European civilization is the history of the gradual enfranchisement of classes of society. The feudal sovereign was limited by the power of the military chieftains, whose valor achieved his conquests. The vast and increasing importance of commercial transactions gave new value to the municipal privileges of which the Roman empire had bequeathed the precedents; while the intricate questions that were perpetually arising for adjudication, crowded the igno XVI. rant military magistrate from the bench, and reserved CHAP. the wearisome toil of deliberation for the learning of his clerk. The emancipation of the country people followed. In every European code, the ages of feudal influence, of mercantile ambition, of the enfranchisement of the yeomanry, appear distinctly in succession. It is the peculiar glory of England, that her free people always had a share in the government. From the first, her freeholders had legislative power as well as freedom; and the tribunals were subjected to popular influence by the institution of a jury. The majority of her laborers were serfs; many husbandmen were bondmen, as the name implies; but the established liberties of freeholders quickened, in every part of England, the instinct for popular advancement. The Norman invasion could not uproot the ancient institutions; they lived in the heart of the nation, and rose superior to the Conquest. The history of England is therefore marked by an original, constant and increasing political activity of the people. In the fourteenth century, the peasantry, conducted by tilers, and carters, and ploughmen, demanded of their young king a'deliverance from the bondage and burdens of feudal oppression; in the fifteenth century, the last traces of villenage were wiped away; in the sixteenth, the noblest ideas of human destiny, awakening in the common mind, became the central points round which plebeian sects were gathered; in the seventeenth century, the enfranchised yeomanry began to feel an instinct for dominion; and its kindling ambition, quickly fanned to a flame, would not rest till it had attempted a democratic revolution. The best soldiers of the Long Parliament were country people; the men that turned the battle on Marston Moor XVI. CHAP. were farmers and farmers' sons, fighting, as they believed, for their own cause. The progress from the rout of Wat Tyler to the victories of Naseby, and Worcester, and Dunbar, was made in less than three centuries. So rapid was the diffusion of ideas of freedom, so palpable was the advancement of popular intelligence, energy, and happiness, that to whole classes of enthusiasts the day of perfect enfranchisement seemed to have dawned; legislation, ceasing to be partial, was to be reformed and renewed on general principles, and the reign of justice and reason was about to begin. In the language of that age, Christ's kingdom on earth, his second coming, was at hand. Under the excitement of hopes, created by the rapid progress of liberty, which, to the common mind, was an inexplicable mystery, the blissful centuries of the millennium promised to open upon a favored world. Political enfranchisements had been followed by the emancipation of knowledge. The powers of nature were freely examined; the merchants always tolerated or favored the pursuits of science. Galileo had been safe at Venice, and honored at Amsterdam or London. The method of free inquiry, applied to chemistry, had invented gunpowder and changed the manners of the feudal aristocracy; applied to geography, had discovered a hemisphere, and, circumnavigating the globe, made the theatre of commerce wide as the world; applied to the mechanical process of multiplying books, had brought the New Testament, in the vulgar tongue, within the reach of every class; applied to the rights of persons and property, had, for the English, built up a system of common law, and given securities to liberty in the interpretation of contracts. Under the guidance of Bacon, the inductive method, in its freedom, was XVI. about to investigate the laws of the outward world, CHAP. and reveal the wonders of divine Providence as displayed in the visible universe. de Aug. On the continent of Europe, Descartes had already 1637. applied the method of observation and free inquiry to the study of morals and the mind; in England, Bacon hardly proceeded beyond the province of natural philosophy. He compared the subtile visions, in which the Bacon contemplative soul indulges, to the spider's web, and Bci. 1. 1. sneered at them as frivolous and empty; but the spider's web is essential to the spider's well-being, and for his neglect of the inner voice, Bacon paid the terrible penalty of a life disgraced by flattery, selfishness, and mean compliance. Freedom, as applied to morals, was cherished in England among the people, and therefore had its development in religion. The AngloSaxons were a religious people. Henry II. had as little superstitious regard for the Roman see as Henry VIII.; but the oppressed Anglo-Saxons looked for shelter to the church, and invoked the enthusiasm of Thomas a Becket to fetter the Norman tyrant and bind the Norman aristocracy in iron shackles. The enthusiast fell a victim to the church and to Anglo-Saxon liberty. If, from the day of his death, the hierarchy abandoned the cause of the people, that cause always found advocates in the inferior clergy; and Wickliffe did not fear to deny dominion to vice and to claim it for justice. The reformation appeared, and the inferior clergy, rising against Rome and against domestic tyranny, had a common faith and common political cause with the people. A body of the yeomanry, becoming Independents, planted Plymouth colony. The inferior gentry espoused Calvinism, and fled to Massachusetts. The popular movement of intellectual liberty is measured by ad42 VOL. II. |