Revolution she had come to rank next after Virginia and Massachusetts in populousness. The chief elements in this rapid increase were two great streams of immigration - the Palatinate German and Scotch-Irish streams which were drawn thither in consequence of Penn's ideas. One of the most interesting aspects in which to consider Pennsylvania is as the chief centre of diffusion of the people who became afterward the pioneers of the democratic West. In our next and concluding chapter, something must be said concerning this matter.

Centres of

of the non

English population.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE MIGRATIONS OF SECTS.

THE colonies of New York and Pennsylvania were not only more heterogeneous in population than any of the others, but they were the principal centres of distribution of the non-English population from the seaboard to the Alleghany mountains. In the New England colonies, distribution during the seventeenth century, the nonEnglish element might most succinctly be described by saying that there was no such element; in the eighteenth century it was extremely small, though not without importance. Virginia and Maryland also were at first purely English, but the tidewater region, in the eighteenth century, received some foreign accessions and the Appalachian region far more. Among the oldest colonies, therefore, New York was the only one which had any considerable foreign population, and there it formed a large majority of the whole. Of the younger colonies the two Carolinas had a large foreign element among the dwellers on the seaboard, and still larger in the back country. But all this mountain population, in the Carolinas as well as in Virginia and Maryland, entered the country by way of Pennsylvania; and this migration was so great, both in its physical dimensions

and in the political and social effects which it has wrought, that Pennsylvania acquires especial interest as the temporary tarrying-place and distributing centre for so much that we now call characteristically American.

Of the different classes of non-English immigrants during the colonial times, while all were represented in the city of New York, the Jews and the French Protestants settled chiefly on the seaboard, and on the other hand the Germans and the so-called Scotch-Irish found their way in great numbers to what was then the western frontier. We must devote a few words to each of these classes.

in Spain.

The city of New York has always been the principal home of the Jews in the United States, and it was in connection with the Dutch enterprise in founding New Netherland that they were first brought here. It was from various quarters, but mainly from the Spanish peninsula that they had come to Holland. In all the history The Jews of this wonderful people there is no more brilliant chapter than that of their career in Spain under the Mohammedan dynasties between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. In point of civilization, in the days when Philip Augustus and lion-hearted Richard went together on their crusade, such cities as Toledo and Cordova were as far in advance of London and Paris as London and Paris are now in advance of Toledo and Cordova, and in this Spanish preeminence the Jews played a foremost part. Such men as Ibn Gebirol and Maimonides were the great teachers of their

time, and influences wafted across the Pyrenees had much to do with the Albigensian culture in southern France. As the Christians in Spain slowly conquered and drove back the Mussulmans, the persecution of Jews began and steadily increased in virulence, until the year 1492, which witnessed the surrender of Granada and downfall of the last Moorish kingdom, saw also the abominable edict which drove from their homes and their native land 200,000 honest and industrious Spanish citizens of Hebrew race and faith. In that eventful year, when an inscrutable Providence put into the hands of Spain the rich prize of America, did she enter upon that course of wholesale persecution which proved her to be unworthy of such opportunities and incapable of using them. The cost of Columbus's second voyage was partly defrayed with stolen money, the property of Jews who had been dragged on shipboard and carried over to Morocco. Meanwhile several industries received a death-blow, and in particular many cities were left without a single physician or any person qualified to act as notary public.1 But the edict of 1492, savagely as it was executed, did not suffice to remove all Jews, and for the next century a large part of the work of the Inquisition consisted in burning them and seizing their goods.

The revolt of the Netherlands gave them an opportunity for emigration of which they were not slow to avail themselves, and by the end of the sixteenth century they were to be found in all the 1 Graetz, Les Juifs d'Espagne, 121.

Their migra

cities of Holland, especially in Amsterdam, whereby Andrew Marvel was provoked to write a poem in which that city is said to have tion to the its "bank of conscience," where "all opinions find credit and exchange ;" yea, continues the poet, with what is meant for withering sarcasm:—

Netherlands.

Among these settlers in Holland were some from Poland and Germany, but the great majority were from the Spanish peninsula, and some of the most highly cultivated of these were Portuguese. Of such parents was born at Amsterdam, in 1632, Benedict Spinoza, one of the most exalted names in all the history of human thought and human character.

Arrivals of

Jews in New

Netherland

and Rhode

In Holland, as usual, many of the Jews were bankers. They were liberal subscribers to the stock of the West India Company, and there were several Hebrew names on the list of directors. When the Dutch took possession of Brazil in 1624, a party of Jews went over and settled there; but in 1645 the Portuguese rose against the Dutch and after nine years of desultory fighting, compelled them to sign a treaty in which they gave up all claim to the country. As for the resident Jews, the Portuguese agreed to give them "an amnesty, in all wherein they could promise it,' too vague an assurance to be very assuring. In the autumn of that year, 1654, the barque Santa Caterina arrived at New Amsterdam from Brazil, with 27

1 Daly, Jews in North America, 3.

Island.