these distant, unoccupied shores. I know not that the work of thorough reform could be safely trusted to any other hands. I can credit their disinterestedness, when they maintain the equality of ranks; for no rich forfeitures of attainted lords await them in the wilderness. I need not question the sincerity with which they assert the rights of conscience; for the plundered treasures of an ancient hierarchy are not to seal their doctrine. They rested the edifice of their civil and religious liberties, on a foundation, as pure as the snows around them. Blessed be the spot, the only one on earth, where such a foundation was ever laid! Blessed be the spot, the only one on earth, where man has attempted to establish the good, without beginning with the sad, the odious, the often suspicious, task of pulling down the bad! III. Under these auspices, the Pilgrims landed on the coast of New England. They found it a region of moderate fertility, offering an unsubdued wilderness to the hand of labor, with a climate, temperate, indeed, but, compared with that which they had left, verging somewhat near to either extreme; and a soil, which promised neither gold nor diamonds, nor any thing but what should be gained from it by patient industry. This was but a poor reality for that dream of Oriental luxury, with which America had filled the imaginations of men. The visions of Indian wealth, of mines of silver and gold, and fisheries of pearl, with which the Spanish adventurers in Mexico and Peru had astonished the ears of Europe, were but poorly fulfilled on the bleak, rocky, and sterile, plains of New England. No doubt, in the beginning of the settlement, these circumstances operated unfavorably on the growth of the colony. In the nature of things, it is mostly adventurers, who incline to leave their homes and native land, and risk the uncertainty of another hemisphere; and a climate and soil like ours furnished but little attraction to the adventuring class. Captain Smith, in his zeal to promote the growth of New England, is at no little pains to show, that the want of mineral treasures was amply compensated by the abundant fishery of the coast; and having sketched, in strong colors, the prosperity and wealth of the states of Holland, he adds, "Divers, I know, may allege many other assistances, but this is the chiefest mine, and the sea the source of those silver streams of their virtue, which hath made them now the very miracle of industry, the only pattern of perfection for these affairs; and the benefit of fishing is that primum mobile* that turns all their spheres to this height of plenty, strength, honor, and exceeding great admiration."+ While we smile at this overwrought panegyric, on the primitive resource of our fathers, we cannot but acknowledge, that it has foundation in truth. It is, doubtless, to the untempting qualities of our climate and soil, and the conditions of industry and frugality, on which alone the prosperity of the colony could be secured, that we are to look for a full share of the final success of the enterprise. To this, it is to be ascribed, that the country itself was not preoccupied by a crowded population of savages, like the West India Islands and Mexico, who, placed upon a soil, yielding, almost spontaneously, a superabundance of food, had multiplied into populous empires, and made a progress in the arts, which served no other purpose, than to give strength and permanence to some of the most frightful systems of despotism, that ever afflicted humanity; systems, uniting all that is most horrible in depraved civilization and wild barbarity. The problem, indeed, is hard to be solved, in what way, and by what steps, a continent, possessed by savage tribes, is to be lawfully occupied and colonized by civilized man. But this question was divested of much of its practical difficulty, by the scantiness of the native population, which our fathers found in New England, * The first cause of motion, the mainspring, the first impulse. and the migratory life, to which the necessity of the chase reduced them. It is owing to this, that the annals of New England exhibit no scenes, like those which were acted in Hispaniola, in Mexico, and Peru; no tragedies like those of Anacaona, of Guatimozin, and of Atahualpa; no statesman like Bobadilla; no heroes like Pizarro and Cortes; "No dark Ovando, no religious Boyle." The qualities of our climate and soil enter largely, in other ways, into that natural basis, on which our prosperity and our freedom have been reared. It is these, which distinguish the smiling aspect of our busy, thriving villages, from the lucrative desolation of the sugar islands, and all the wide-spread, undescribed, indescribable, miseries, of the colonial system of modern Europe, as it has existed, beyond the barrier of these mighty oceans, in the unvisited, unprotected, and unavenged, recesses of either India. We have had abundant reason to be contented with this austere sky, this hard, unyielding soil. Poor as it is, it has left us no cause to sigh for the luxuries of the tropics, nor to covet the mines of the southern regions of our hemisphere. Our rough and hardly subdued hill-sides, and barren plains, have produced us that, which neither ores, nor spices, nor sweets could purchase; which would not spring in the richest gardens of the despotic East. The compact numbers and the strength, the general intelligence and the civilization, which, since the world began, were never exhibited beneath the sultry line, have been the precious product of this ironbound coast. The rocks and the sands, which would yield us neither the cane nor the coffee tree, have yielded us, not only an abundance and a steadiness in resources, rarely consistent with the treacherous profusion of tropical colonies, but the habits the manners, the institutions, the industrious pop he schools and the churches, beyond all the 6 "Man is the nobler growth our soil supplies, Describe to me, a country, rich in veins of the precious metals, that is traversed by good roads. Inform me of the convenience of bridges, where the rivers roll over golden sands. Tell me of a thrifty, prosperous village of freemen, in the miserable districts where every clod of the earth is kneaded up for diamonds, beneath the lash of the task-master. No, never! while the constitution, not of states, but of human nature, remains the same; never, while the laws, not of civil society, but of God, are unrepealed, will there be a hardy, virtuous, independent yeomanry, in regions, where two acres of untilled banana will feed a hundred men. It is idle to call that food, which can never feed a free, intelligent, industrious population. It is not food; it is dust; it is chaff; it is ashes; there is no nourishment in it, if it be not carefully sown, and painfully reaped, by laborious freemen, on their own feesimple acres. IV. Nor ought we to omit to say, that, if our forefathers found, in the nature of the region to which they emigrated, the most favorable spot for the growth of a free and happy state, they themselves sprang from the land, the best adapted to furnish the habits and principles essential to the great undertaking. In an age, that speculates, and speculates to important purpose, on the races of fossil animals, of which no living specimen has existed since the Deluge, and which compares, with curious criticism, the dialects of languages, which ceased to be spoken, a thousand years ago, it cannot be called idle, to inquire, which, of the different countries of modern Europe, possesses the qualities, that best adapt it to become the parent nation of a new and free state. I know not, in fact, what more momentous question, in human affairs, could be asked, than that which regards the most hopeful lineage of a collective empire. But, without engaging in so extensive a discussion, I may presume, that there is not one who hears me that does not feel it a matter of congratulation and joy, that our fathers were Englishmen. No character is perfect among nations, more than among men; but it must needs be conceded, that, after our own Country, England is the most favored abode of liberty; or rather, that, besides our own, it is the only land, where liberty can be said to exist; the only land, where the voice of the sovereign, is not stronger than the voice of the law. We can scarce revolve, with patience, the idea, that we might have been a Spanish colony, a Portuguese colony, or a Dutch colony. We can scarcely compare, with coolness, the inheritance of those institutions, which were transmitted to us, by our fathers, with that which we must have received from almost any other country; absolute government, military despotism, and the "holy inquisition." What would have been the condition of this flourishing and happy land, had these been the institutions, on which its settlement was founded? There are, unfortunately, too many materials for answering this question, in the history of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the American continent, from the first moment of unrelenting waste and desolation, to the distractions and conflicts, of which we ourselves are the witnesses. What hope can there be, for the colo nies of nations, which possess, themselves, no spring of improvement; and tolerate none in the regions over which they rule; whose administration sets no bright examples of political independence; whose languages send out no reviving lessons of sound and practicalscience, (afraid of nothing that is true,) of manly literature, of free speculation; but repeat, with every ship that crosses the Atlantic, the same debasing voice of despotism, credulity, superstition, and slavery? What citizen of our republic is not grateful, in the Who does not contrast which our history presents? feel, what reflecting American does not acknowledge, the incalculable advantages derived to this land, out of the deep foundations of civil, intellectual, and moral, |