and invited to accept English liberties as a boon. Nowhere was the collision between the royal governor and the colonial assembly so violent or so inveterate; nowhere had the legislature, by its method of granting money, so nearly exhausted and appropriated to itself all executive authority; nowhere had the relations of the province to Great Britain been more sharply controverted. The board of trade esteemed the provincial legislature to rest for its existence on acts of the royal prerogative, while the people looked upon their representatives as existing by an inherent right, and coördinate with the British House of Commons.

The laws of trade excited still more resistance. Why should a people, of whom one half were of foreign ancestry, be cut off from all the world but England? Why must the children of Holland be debarred from the ports of the Netherlands? Why must their ships seek the produce of Europe and, by a later law, the produce of Asia, in English harbors alone? Why were negro slaves the only considerable object of foreign commerce which England did not compel to be first landed on its shores? The British restrictive system was transgressed by all America, but most of all by New York, the child of the Netherlands. Especially the British ministry had been invited, in 1752, to observe that, while the consumption of tea was annually increasing in America, the export from England was decreasing; and meantime, the little island of St. Eustatius, a heap of rocks but two leagues in length by one in breadth, without a rivulet or a spring, gathered in its storehouses the products of Holland, of the Orient, of the world; and its harbor was more and more filled with fleets of colonial trading vessels, which, if need were, completed their cargoes by entering the French islands with Dutch papers. Under the British statutes, which made the commercial relations of America to England not a union, but a bondage, America bought of England hardly more than she would have done on the system of freedom; and this small advantage was dearly purchased by the ever-increasing cost of cruisers, customhouse officers, and vice-admiralty courts, and the discontent of the merchants.

The large landholders were jealous of British authority, which threatened to bound their pretensions, or question their titles, or, through parliament, to burden them with a land tax. The lawyers of the colony, chiefly Presbyterians, and educated in Connecticut, joined heartily with the merchants and the

great proprietors to resist every encroachment from England. In no province was the very near approach of independence discerned so clearly, or so openly predicted.

New York had been settled under large patents of lands to individuals; New England under grants to towns; and the institution of towns was its glory and its strength. The inhabited part of Massachusetts was recognized as divided into little territories, each of which, for its internal purposes, constituted an integral government, free from supervision; having power to choose annually its own officers; to hold meetings of all freemen at its pleasure; to discuss in those meetings any subject of public interest; to see that every able-bodied man within its precincts was enrolled in the militia and provided with arms, ready for immediate use; to elect and to instruct its representatives; to raise and appropriate money for the support of the ministry, of schools, of highways, of the poor, and for defraying other necessary expenses within the town. It was incessantly deplored, by royalists of later days, that the law which confirmed these liberties had received the unreflecting sanction of William III., and the most extensive interpretation in practice. Boston, on more than one occasion, ventured in town meeting to appoint its own agent to present a remonstrance to the board of trade. New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine, which was a part of Massachusetts, had similar regulations; so that all New England was an aggregate of organized democracies. But the complete development of the institution was to be found in Connecticut and the Massachusetts bay. There each township was substantially a territorial parish; the town was the religious congregation; the independent church was established by law; the minister was elected by the people, who annually made grants for his support. There the system of free schools was carried to such perfection that an adult born in New England and unable to write and read could not be found. He that will understand the political character of New England in the eighteenth century must study the constitution of its towns, its congregations, its schools, and its militia.

Yet in these democracies the hope of independence, as a near event, had not dawned; the inhabitants still clung with persevering affection to the land of their ancestry and their language. They were of homogeneous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles I.

and Charles II. They were frugal and industrious. Along the seaside, wherever there was a good harbor, fishermen, familiar with the ocean, gathered in hamlets; and each returning season saw them, with an ever-increasing number of mariners and vessels, taking the cod and mackerel, and sometimes pursuing the whale into the northern seas. At Boston a society was formed for promoting domestic manufactures: on one of its anniversaries, three hundred young women appeared on the Common, clad in homespun, seated in a triple row, each with a spinning wheel, and each busily transferring the flax from the distaff to the spool. The town built "a manufacturing house," and there were bounties to encourage the workers in linen. How the board of trade were alarmed at the news! How they censured Shirley for not having frowned on the business! How committees of the House of Commons examined witnesses, and made proposals for prohibitory laws, till the Boston manufacturing house, designed to foster home industry, fell into decay! Of slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the southeast of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the slave trade, and where, in two or three towns, negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.

In the settlements which grew up in the interior, on the margin of the greenwood, the plain meeting-house of the congregation for public worship was everywhere the central point; near it stood the public school. The snug farm-houses, owned as freeholds, without quit-rents, were dotted along the way. In every hand was the Bible; every home was a house of prayer; all had been taught, many had comprehended, a methodical theory of the divine purpose in creation, and of the destiny of man.

While the common mind of New England was inspired by the great thought of the sole sovereignty of God, it did not lose personality and human freedom in pantheistic fatalism. Like Augustine, who made war both on Manicheans and Pelagians; like the Stoics, whose morals it most nearly resembled, it asserted by just dialectics, or, as some would say, by a sublime inconsistency, the power of the individual will. In every action it beheld the union of the motive and volition. The action, it saw, was according to the strongest motive; and it knew that what proves the strongest motive depends on the character of the will. The Calvinist of New England, who

longed to be "morally good and excellent," had, therefore, no other object of moral effort than to make "the will truly lovely and right."

Action, therefore, as flowing from an energetic, right, and lovely will, was the ideal of New England. It rejected the asceticism of one-sided spiritualists, and fostered the whole man, seeking to perfect his intelligence and improve his outward condition. It saw in every one the divine and the human nature. It subjected but did not extirpate the inferior principles. It placed no merit in vows of poverty or celibacy, and spurned the thought of non-resistance. In a good cause its people were ready to take up arms and fight, cheered by the conviction that God was working in them both to will and to do.

THE TRUE POLICY OF GREAT BRITAIN TOWARD HER AMERICAN COLONIES.

BY EDMUND BURKE.

(From Speech on "Conciliation with America," March 22, 1775.)

[EDMUND BURKE, British orator and political philosopher, was born in Dublin, Ireland, January 12, 1729. He gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1746; in 1750 went to London to study law, but never was called to the bar; became noted in literary and theatrical circles, and in 1756 published his "Vindication of Natural Society," in answer to Bolingbroke, and the treatise on "The Sublime and the Beautiful." In 1759 he became private secretary to "Single Speeca" William Gerard Hamilton, but a few years later quarreled with and left him. In 1764 he became a member of the famous club with Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, etc. In 1765 he was appointed private secretary to Lord Rockingham, just made first lord of the treasury, and was shortly returned to Parliament. His speeches are part of the enduring monuments of English literature. In 1769 he published his pamphlets, "Observations on a Late Publication (George Grenville's) on the Present State of the Nation"; and in 1770 "Thoughts on the Present Discontents." He was made privy councilor and paymaster of the forces in 1782. For several years from 1783 he was occupied with the affairs of India, the prosecution of Warren Hastings, etc. Late in 1789 he wrote "Reflections on the Revolution" in France, issued a year later; in 1796, "Letters on a Regicide Peace." He died July 9, 1797.]

PEACE implies reconciliation; and where there has been a material dispute, reconciliation does in a manner always imply

concession on the one part or on the other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in affirming that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace with honor and with safety. Such an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear. When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior; and he loses forever that time and those chances, which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all inferior power.

The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide, are these two: first, whether you ought to concede ; and secondly, what your concession ought to be. To enable us to determine both on the one and the other of these great questions with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object which we have before us. Because after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we must govern America according to that nature, and to those circumstances; and not according to our own imaginations; nor according to abstract ideas of right; by no means according to mere general theories of government.

I am sensible, sir, that all which I have asserted in my detail is admitted in the gross, but that quite a different conclusion is drawn from it. America, gentlemen say, is a noble object. It is an object well worth fighting for. Certainly it is, if fighting a people is the best way of gaining them. Gentlemen in this respect will be led to their choice of means by their complexions and their habits. Those who understand the military art will of course have some predilection for it. Those who wield the thunder of the state may have more confidence in the efficacy of arms. But I confess, possibly for want of this knowledge, my opinion is much more in favor of prudent management than of force, considering force not as an odious, but a feeble instrument, for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connection with us.

First, sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.