at this day a subject of dispute. Yet the colony, barren as were the plains around them, exported boards and shingles and staves to Barbados. The traffic was profitable; emigration increased; and it has been said that, in 1666, the plantation contained eight hundred souls. Yeamans, who understood the nature of colonial trade, managed its affairs without reproach.

The proprietaries of Carolina, having collected minute information respecting the coast, coveted an extension of their domains. Indifferent to the claims of Virginia, and in contempt of the Spanish garrison at St. Augustine, Clarendon and his associates, in June, 1665, obtained from the king a new charter, which granted to them all the land lying between twentynine degrees and thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, north latitude, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The soil, and, under the limitation of a nominal allegiance, the sovereignty, were theirs, with the power of legislation, subject to the consent of the future freemen of the colony. The grant of privileges was ample, like those to Rhode Island and Connecticut. An express clause opened the way for religious freedom; another held out to the proprietaries a hope of revenue from colonial customs, to be imposed in colonial ports by Carolina legislatures; another gave them the power of erecting cities and manors, counties and baronies, and of establishing orders of nobility with other than English titles. The power to levy troops, to erect fortifications, to make war by sea and land on their enemies, and to exercise martial law in cases of necessity, was not withheld. Every favor was extended to the proprietaries; nothing was neglected but the interests of the English sovereign and the rights of the colonists. Imagination encouraged every extravagant hope; and Ashley Cooper, afterward earl of Shaftesbury, the most active and the most able of the corporators, was, in 1668, deputed by them to frame for the dawning states a perfect constitution, worthy to endure throughout all ages.

Shaftesbury was at this time in the maturity of his genius ; celebrated for eloquence, philosophic acuteness, and sagacity; high in power, and of aspiring ambition. Born to hereditary wealth, the pupil of Prideaux had given his early years to the

assiduous pursuit of knowledge; and from boyhood the intellectual part of his nature held the mastery. Cradled in politics and chosen a member of parliament at the age of nineteen, his long public career was checkered by the greatest varieties of success. His party connections were affected by the revolutions of the times; and he has been charged with political inconsistency. But men of great mental power, though they may often change their instruments, change their principles and their objects rarely. He often shifted his associates, never his purposes; alike the enemy to absolute monarchy and to democratic influence, he connected his own aggrandizement with the privileges and interests of British commerce, of Protestant religious liberty, and of the landed aristocracy of England. In the Long Parliament, he acted with the people against absolute power; but, while Vane adhered to the parliament from love of popular rights, Shaftesbury adhered to it as the guardian of aristocratic liberty. Under Cromwell, Shaftesbury was still the opponent of arbitrary power. At the restoration, he would not tolerate an agreement with the king; such agreement, at that time, could not but have been democratic; and the nobility sought, in the plenitude of the royal power, an ally against the people. When Charles II. showed a disposition to become, like Louis XIV., superior to the gentry as well as to the democracy, Shaftesbury, from hostility to the supporters of prerogative, joined the party opposed to the ultra royalists. The party which he represented, the great aristocracy of blood and of wealth, had to sustain itself between the people on one side and the monarch on the other. The "nobility" was, in his view, the "rock" of 'English principles;" the power of the peerage and of arbitrary monarchy were "as two buckets, of which one goes down exactly as the other goes up." In the people of England, as the depository of power and freedom, Shaftesbury had no confidence; his system protected wealth and privilege; and he desired to intrust the conservative principles of society to the exclusive custody of the favored classes. Cromwell had proposed, and Vane had advocated, a reform in parliament; Shaftesbury showed no disposition to diminish the influence of the nobility over the lower house.

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The personal character of Shaftesbury was analogous to his political principles. He loved wealth without being a slave to avarice, and, though he would have made no scruple of "robbing the devil or the altar," and, as lord chancellor, sometimes received a present, his judgment was never suspected of a bias. Careless of precedents, usages, and bar-rules, he was quick to discern the right, and to render an equitable decision. Everybody applauded but the lawyers; they censured the contempt of ancient forms, the diminished weight of authority, and the neglect of legal erudition; the historians, the poets, common fame, even his enemies, declared that never had a judge possessed more discerning eyes or cleaner hands:

"Unbribed, unbought, the wretched to redress,

Swift of despatch and easy of access."

Nobody questioned that, as a royalist minister, he might have "freely gathered the golden fruit;" but he disdained the monarch's favor, and stood firmly by the vested rights of his order.

In person he was small, and alike irritable and versatile. It belongs to such a man to have cunning rather than wisdom; celerity rather than dignity; the high powers of abstraction and generalization rather than the still higher power of successful action. He transacted business with an admirable ease and mastery, for his lucid understanding delighted in general principles; but he could not successfully control men, for he had neither conduct in the direction of a party nor integrity in the choice of means. He would use a prejudice as soon as an argument; would stimulate a superstition as soon as wake truth to the battle; would flatter a crowd or court a king. Despising the people, he attempted to guide them by inflaming their passions.

This contempt for humanity punishes itself; Shaftesbury was destitute of the healthy judgment which comes from sympathy with his fellow-men. Alive to the force of an argument, he never could judge of its effect on other minds; his subtle wit, prompt to seize on the motives to conduct and the natural affinities of parties, could not discern the moral obstacles to new combinations. He had no natural sense of propriety; he despised gravity as, what indeed it often is, the affec

tation of dulness, and thought it no condescension to charm by drollery. Himself without veneration for prescriptive usage, he never could estimate the difficulty of abrogating a form or overcoming a prejudice. His mind regarded purposes and results, and he did not so much defy appearances as rest ignorant of their power. Desiring to exclude the duke of York from the throne, no delicacy of sentiment restrained him from proposing the succession to the uncertain issue of an abandoned woman, who had once been mistress to the king, and he saw no cruelty in urging Charles II. to divorce a confiding wife, who had the blemish of barrenness.

The same want of common feeling, joined to a surprising mobility, left Shaftesbury in ignorance of the energy of relig ious convictions. Skeptics are apt to be superstitious; the moral restlessness of perpetual doubt often superinduces nervous timidity. Shaftesbury would not fear God, but he watched the stars; he did not receive Christianity, and he could not reject astrology.

Excellent in counsel, Shaftesbury was poor as an executive agent. His spirit fretted at delay, and grew feverish with waiting. His eager impetuosity betrayed his designs, and, when unoccupied, his vexed and anxious mind lost its balance, and planned desperate counsels. In times of tranquillity, he was too restless for success; but, when the storm was really come, and old landmarks were washed away and the wonted lights in the heavens were darkened, Shaftesbury was selfpossessed, and knew how to evolve a rule of conduct from general principles.

At a time when John Locke was unknown to the world, Shaftesbury detected the riches of his mind, and chose him for a friend and adviser in the work of legislation for Carolina. Locke was at this time in the midway of life, adorning the clearest understanding with gentleness, good humor, and ingenuousness. Of a sunny disposition, he could be choleric without malice, and gay without levity. He was a most dutiful son. In dialectics he was unparalleled, except by his patron. Esteeming the pursuit of truth as the first object of life, and its attainment as the criterion of dignity, he never sacrificed a conviction to an interest. The ill success of the

democratic revolution of England had made him an enemy to popular innovations. He had seen the commons of England incapable of retaining the precious conquest they had made, and, being neither a theorist like Milton nor a tory like Tillotson, he cherished what, at that day, were called English principles, looking to the aristocracy as the surest adversaries of arbitrary power. Emphatically free from avarice, he could yet, as a political writer, deify liberty under the form of wealth; to him slavery seemed no unrighteous institution; and he defines " political power to be the right of making laws for regulating and preserving property." Having no kindling love for ideal excellence, he abhorred the designs and disbelieved the promises of democracy; he could sneer at the enthusiasm of Friends. Unlike Penn, he believed it possible to construct the future according to the forms of the past. No voice of God within his soul called him away from the usages of England; and, as he went forth to lay the foundations of civil government in the wilderness, he bowed his understanding to the persuasive influence of Shaftesbury. But the political institutions of the United States were not formed by giant minds, or "nobles after the flesh." American history knows but one avenue to success in American legislation-freedom from ancient prejudice. The truly great law-givers in our colonies first became as little children,

In framing constitutions for Carolina, Locke forgot that there can be no such thing as a creation of laws; for laws are but the arrangement of men in society, and good laws are but the arrangement of men in society in their just and natural relations. It is the prerogative of self-government that it adapts itself to every circumstance which can arise. Its institutions, if often defective, are always appropriate; for they are the exact representation of the condition of a people, and can be evil only because there are evils in society, exactly as a coat may suit an ill-shaped person. Habits of thought and action fix their stamp on the public code; the faith, the prejudices, the hopes of a people, may be read there; and, as knowledge advances, each erroneous judgment, each perverse enactment, yields to the embodied force of the common will. Success