of 1688, for themselves and their posterity forever.

It is obvious, therefore, that the meliorations, which have taken place in Europe within the last two centuries, rest on no sound principle, and are but the effect of alteratives on the fatal malady of age, with which her states are sick at heart. It is true that the popular element, such is its sovereign healing power, which, even on the poor footing of a compromise, has been introduced into a portion of their political constitutions, has operated some of the beneficent effects of the fabled transfusion of youthful blood into aged veins. But the principles of prescription and acquiescence unfortunately run as much in favor of abuses and corruptions as of privileges. On the received footing, the acknowledged vices and evils of their institutions are as sacred as the best rights, and the door to any consistent and rational improvement is effectually closed; because the more degenerate, the more antiquated, the more hostile to the spirit and character of the age, the institution that needs reform may be, the more ancient it will also

* See Note I.

commonly be found, and in consequence, the more strongly fortified by prescription.

While, therefore, the work of social renovation is entirely hopeless in Europe, we cannot but regard it as the plain interposition of Providence, that, at the critical point of time, when the most powerful springs of improvement were in operation, a chosen company of pilgrims, who were actuated by these springs of improvement, in all their strength, who had purchased the privilege of dissent at the high price of banishment from the civilized world, and who, with the dust of their feet, had shaken off the antiquated abuses and false principles, which had been accumulating for thousands of years, came over to 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 and

innocent 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 too suspicious task of pulling down the bad.

III. Under these favorable 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

* Smith's Generall Historie, &c. Vol. II, p. 185, Richmond Edit.

cannot but do justice to the principle, on which it rests. 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, that crowned 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, like Mexico and Peru, 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

* See Note K.