ized its seal is renewed; the symbol, an anchor; the motto, HOPE.

From Massachusetts "the amazing news did soon fly like lightning;" and the people of Connecticut spurned the government which Andros had appointed, and which they had always feared it was a sin to obey. The charter was resumed; an assembly was convened; and, in spite of the FINIS of Andros, on the ninth of May, 1689, new chapters were begun in the records of freedom. Suffolk county, on Long Island, rejoined Connecticut.

New York shared the impulse, but with less unanimity. "The Dutch plot" was matured by Jacob Leisler, a native of the republic of Frankfort-on-the-Main, a man of energy, but ill-educated, and by his son-in-law Milborne. Led by them, the common people among the Dutch, with less support from the English population, insisted on proclaiming the stadholder of the united provinces king of England.

In New Jersey there was no insurrection. The inhabitants were unwilling to invoke the interference of the proprietaries. There is no reason to doubt that, in the several towns, officers were chosen, as before, by the inhabitants themselves, to regulate all local affairs, while the provincial government, as established by James II., fell with Andros. The Mohawks, kindling at the prospect of an ally, chanted their loudest war-song, and prepared to descend on Montreal.

This New England revolution, beginning at Boston, extended to the Chesapeake and to the wilderness, and “made a great noise in the world." Its object was Protestant liberty; William and Mary, the Protestant sovereigns, were proclaimed with rejoicings such as America had never before known in its intercourse with England.

Could it be that America was deceived in her confidence; that she had but substituted the absolute sovereignty of parliament, which to her would prove the double despotism of a commercial as well as a landed aristocracy, for the rule of the Stuarts? Boston was the centre of the revolution which now spread to the Chesapeake; in less than a century it will begin a revolution for humanity, and rouse a spirit of power to emancipate the world.

VOL. I.-40

CHAPTER XIX.

THE RESULT THUS FAR.

THUS have we traced, almost exclusively from contemporary documents and records, the colonization of the twelve oldest states of our union. At the period of the great European revolution of 1688 they contained not very many beyond two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom Massachusetts, with Plymouth and Maine, may have had forty-four thousand; New Hampshire, and Rhode Island with Providence, each six thousand; Connecticut, from seventeen to twenty thousand; that is, all New England, seventy-five thousand souls; New York, not less than twenty thousand; New Jersey, half as many; Pennsylvania and Delaware, perhaps twelve thousand; Maryland, twenty-five thousand; Virginia, fifty thousand, or more; and the two Carolinas, which then included the soil of Georgia, probably not less than eight thousand souls.

The emigration of the fathers of these twelve commonwealths, with the planting of the principles on which they rested, though, like the introduction of Christianity into Rome, but little regarded by contemporary writers, was the most momentous event of the seventeenth century. The elements of our country, such as she exists to-day, were already there.

Of the institutions of the Old World, monarchy had no motive to emigrate, and was present only by its shadow; in the proprietary governments, by the shadow of a shadow. The feudal aristocracy had accomplished its mission in Europe; it could not gain new life among the equal conditions of the wilderness; in at least four of the twelve colonies it did not originally exist at all, and in the rest had scarcely a monu

ment except in the forms of holding property. Priestcraft did not emigrate; to the forests of America religion came as a companion; the American mind never bowed to an idolatry of forms; and there was not a prelate in the English part of the continent. The municipal corporations of the European commercial world, the close intrenchments of burghers against the landed aristocracy, could not be transferred to our shores, where no baronial castles demanded the concerted opposition of guilds. Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, self-confiding and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored its culture and happiness-alone broke away from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our republic. Like Moses, as they said of themselves, they had escaped from Egyptian bondage to the wilderness, that God might there give them the pattern of the tabernacle. Like the favored evangelist, the exiles, in their western Patmos, listened to the angel that dictated the new gospel of freedom. whelmed in Europe, popular liberty, like the fabled fountain of the sacred Arethusa, gushed forth profusely in remoter fields.

Over

Of the nations of the European world, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence. The immense majority of American families were not of "the high folk of Normandie," but were of "the low men," who were Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the south. The Virginians were Anglo-Saxons in the woods again, with the inherited culture and intelligence of the seventeenth century. "The major part of the house of burgesses now consisted of Virginians that never saw a town." The Anglo-Saxon mind, in its serenest nationality, neither distorted by fanaticism, nor subdued by superstition, nor wounded by persecution, nor excited by new ideas, but fondly cherishing the active instinct for personal freedom, secure possession, and legislative power, such as belonged to it before the reformation, and existed independent of the reformation, had made its dwelling-place in the empire of Powhatan. With consistent firmness of

character, the Virginians welcomed representative assemblies; displaced an unpopular governor; at the overthrow of monarchy, established the freest government; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles which prevailed in its forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls.

The colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth had little share in colonizing our America. The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the proscribed Puritans that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign-all had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had been revealed in Judea-the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of Greece-the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guaranteeing absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty; in the highest degree theoretical, and yet in the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and humanethis system was professed in every part of our widely extended country, and cradled our freedom.

Our fathers were not only Christians; they were, even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, Protestants. Now the Protestant reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the awakening of the common people to freedom of mind.

During the decline of the Roman empire, the oppressed invoked the power of Christianity to resist the supremacy of brute force; and the merciful priest assumed the office of protector. The tribunes of Rome, appointed by the people, had been declared inviolable by the popular vote; the new tribunes of humanity, deriving their office from religion, and

ordained by religion to a still more venerable sanctity, defended the poor man's house against lust by the sacrament of marriage; restrained arbitrary passion by a menace of the misery due to sin unrepented of and unatoned; and taught respect for the race by sprinkling every new-born child with the water of life, confirming every youth, bearing the oil of consolation to every death-bed, and sharing freely with every human being the consecrated emblem of God present with man.

But from protectors priests grew to be usurpers. Expressing all moral truth by the mysteries of symbols, and reserving to themselves the administration of seven sacraments, they claimed a monopoly of thought and exercised an absolute spiritual dominion. Human bondage was strongly riveted; for they had fastened it on the affections, the understanding, and the reason. Ordaining their own successors, they ruled human destiny at birth, on entering active life, at marriage, when frailty breathed its confession, when faith aspired to communion with God, and at death.

The fortunes of the human race are embarked in a lifeboat and cannot be wrecked. Mind refuses to rest; and active freedom is a necessary condition of intelligent existence. The instinctive love of truth could warm even the scholastic theologian; but the light which it kindled for him was oppressed by verbal erudition, and its flickering beams, scarce lighting the cell of the solitary, could not fill the colonnade of the cloister, far less reach the busy world.

Sensualism also was free to mock superstition. Scoffing infidelity put on the cardinal's hat, and made even the Vatican ring with ribaldry. But the indifference of dissoluteness has no creative power; it does but substitute the despotism of the senses for a spiritual despotism; it never brought enfranchisements to the multitude.

The feudal aristocracy resisted spiritual authority by the sword; but it was only to claim greater license for their own violence. Temporal sovereigns, jealous of a power which threatened to depose the unjust prince, were ready to set prelacy against prelacy, the national church against the Catholic church; but it was only to assert the absolute liberty of despotism.