Holland; the churches on the shore were thronged with suppliants, begging victory for the right cause and their country. The contest raged, and was exhausted, and was again renewed with unexampled fury. But victory was with De Ruyter and the younger Tromp, the guardians of their country. The British fleet retreated, and was pursued; the coasts of Holland were protected.

For more than a century, no other naval combat was fought between Netherlands and England. The English parliament, condemning the war, refused supplies; Prussia and Austria were alarmed; Spain openly threatened, and Charles II. consented to treaties. All conquests were to be restored; and Holland, which had been 1674. 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 for ever. 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.

On the final transfer of New Netherland to England, Oct. 31. after a military occupation of fifteen months by the Dutch, the brother of Charles II. resumed the possession of New York, and Carteret appeared 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.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES.

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 all members 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 to 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 ignorant military magistrate from the bench, and reserved 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 history is 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 villeinage 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, the yeomanry and owners of small freeholds began to feel an instinct for dominion, and their ambition 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 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 hope, 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 liberties 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 would have 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. The inductive method, in its freedom, was about to investigate the laws of the outward world, and reveal the wonders of divine Providence as displayed in the visible universe.

1637.

On the continent of Europe, Descartes had already 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 contemplative soul indulges, to the spider's web, and 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. If the hierarchy abandoned the cause of the people, that cause always found advocates in the inferior clergy; and Wycliffe did not fear to deny dominion to vice and to claim it for justice. At the Reformation, 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 advances towards the liberty of prophesying and the liberty of conscience.

The moment was arrived for the plebeian mind to make its boldest effort at escape from hereditary prejudices; when the freedom of Bacon, the enthusiasm of Wycliffe, and the politics of Wat Tyler, were to gain the highest unity in a sect; when a popular, and therefore, in that age, a religious party, building upon a divine principle, should demand freedom of mind, purity of morals, and universal enfranchisement.

The sect had its birth in a period of intense public activity, when the heart of England was swelling with passions, and the public mind turbulent with factious leaders; when zeal for reform was invading the church, subverting the throne, and repealing the privileges of feudalism; when Presbyterians in every village were quarrelling with Anabaptists and Independents, and all with the Roman Catholics and the English church.

The sect could arise only among the common people, who had every thing to gain by its success, and the least to hazard by its failure. The privileged classes had no motive to develop a principle before which their privileges would crumble. "Poor mechanics," said William Penn, "are wont to be God's great ambassadors to mankind." "He hath raised up a few despicable and illiterate men," wrote the accomplished Barclay, "to dispense the more full glad tidings reserved for our age." It was the comfort of the Quakers, that they received the truth from a simple sort of people, unmixed with the learning of schools; and, almost for the first time in the history of the world, a plebeian sect proceeded to the complete enfranchisement of mind, teaching the English yeomanry the same method of free inquiry which Socrates had explained to the young men of Athens.

The simplicity of truth was restored by humble instruments, and its first messenger was of low degree. George Fox, the son of "righteous Christopher," a Leicestershire weaver, by his mother descended from the stock of the martyrs, distinguished even in boyhood by frank inflexibility and deep religious feeling, became in early life an apprentice to a Nottingham shoemaker, who was also a landholder, and, like David, and Tamerlane, and Sixtus V., was set by his employer to watch sheep. The occupation was grateful to his mind, for its freedom, innocency, and solitude; and the years of earliest youth passed away in prayer and reading the Bible, frequent fasts, and the reveries of 1644. contemplative devotion. His boyish spirit yearned

after excellence; and he was haunted by a vague desire of an unknown, illimitable good. In the most stormy period of the English democratic revolution, just as the Independents