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in slavery; and, by his testimony at the meetings of Friends, recommended that oppressed part of the creation to the notice of each individual and of the society. Having discerned by a bright and radiant light the certain evidence of divine truth, and not fearing to offend man by its simplicity, he travelled much on the continent of America, and would say to the thoughtful, that "a people used to labor moderately for their living, training up their children in frugality and business, have a happier life than those who live on the labor of slaves; that freemen find satisfaction in improving and providing for their families; but negroes, laboring to support others who claim them as their property, and expecting nothing but slavery during life, have not the like inducement to be industrious."

"Men having power," he continued, "too often misapply it; though we make slaves of the negroes, and the Turks make slaves of the Christians, liberty is the natural right of all men equally." "The slaves look to me like a burdensome stone to such who burden themselves with them. The burden will grow heavier and heavier, till times change in a way disagreeable to us." "It may be just," answered one of his hearers, "for the Almighty so to order it." And while he had fresh and heavenly openings in respect to the care and providence of the Almighty over man, as the most noble amongst his creatures which are visible, and was fully persuaded that, as the life of Christ comes to reign in the earth, all abuse and unnecessary oppression will draw towards an end, yet, under the sense of the overflowing stream of unrighteousness, his life was often a life of mourning; and it was a matter fixed in his mind, that this trade of importing slaves, and way of life in keeping them, were dark gloominess hanging over the land. "Though many willingly ran into it, yet the consequences would be grievous to posterity." Therefore he went about, environed with heavenly light and consolation, persuading men that “the practice of continuing slavery was not right;" and in calmest and most guarded words he endeavored, through the press, "to raise an idea of a general brotherhood, and a disposition easy to be touched with a feeling of each other's

afflictions." The men whom he addressed on both banks of the Delaware were not agreed, in all the branches of the question, on the propriety of keeping negroes; yet their masters began the work of setting them free, "because they had no contract for their labor, and liberty was their right." A general epistle from the yearly meeting of Friends, in 1754, declared it to be the "concern" of their body to bear testimony against the iniquitous practice of slave-dealing, and to warn their members against making any purchase of slaves.

But New York was at this time the central point of political interest. Its position invited it to foster American union. Having the most convenient harbor on the Atlantic, with bays expanding on either hand, and a navigable river penetrating the interior, it held the keys of Canada and the lakes. Crown Point and Niagara, monuments of French ambition, were encroachments upon its limits. Its unsurveyed inland frontier, sweeping round on the north, disputed with New Hampshire the land between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut, and extended into unmeasured distances in the west. Within its bosom, at Onondaga, burned the council-fire of the Six Nations, whose irregular bands had seated themselves near Montreal, on the northern shore of Ontario, and on the Ohio; whose hunters roamed over the northwest and the west; whose war-parties had for ages strolled to Carolina. Here were concentrated by far the most important Indian relations, round which the idea of a general union was shaping itself into a reality. It was to still the hereditary warfare of the Six Nations with the southern Indians that South Carolina and Massachusetts first met at Albany; it was to confirm friendship with them and their allies that New England, and all the central states but New Jersey, had assembled in congress. But a higher principle was needed to blend the several colonies under one sovereignty, and that principle existed on the banks of the Hudson.

England never possessed the affection of the country which it had acquired by conquest. British officials sent home complaints of "the Dutch republicans" as disloyal. The descendants of the Huguenot refugees were taunted

with their origin, and invited to accept English liberties gratefully 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 be subordinate, resting for its existence on acts of the royal prerogative, the king's commissions and the king's instructions, and possessed of none of the attributes of sovereignty; while the people looked upon their representatives as a body participant in sovereignty, existing by an inherent right, and co-ordinate with the British house of

commons.

Affairs of religion also involved political strife. In a province chiefly of Calvinists, the English church was favored, though not established by law; but an act of the prerogative, which limited the selection of the president of the provincial college to those in communion with the church of England, agitated the public mind, and united the Presbyterians in distrust of the royal authority.

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 never acknowledged by New York as valid, and was trangressed by all America; but most of all by this province, to an extent that could not easily be imagined. 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. During the next twenty years, England sought a remedy; 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, custom-house officers, and vice-admiralty courts, and the discontent of the merchants.

The large landholders, whose grants, originally prodigal, irregular, and ill-defined, promised opulence for generations, were equally jealous of British authority, which threatened to bound their pretensions, or question their titles, or, through parliament, to impose 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; meeting the political theories of colonial subordination at the threshold ; teaching the method of increasing colonial power by the system of annual grants; demanding permanent commissions for their judicial officers; opposing the extension of the admiralty jurisdiction; and resisting the admission of bishops, as involving ecclesiastical courts and new prerogatives. In no province was the 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 recognised as divided into little territories, each of which, for its internal purposes, constituted a separate 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 unconscious sanction of William III., and the most extensive interpretation in practice. Boston even, 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 also 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, too, 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. Driven from England by the persecution of the government, its inhabitants still clung with confidence and persevering affection to the land of their ancestry, the people of their kindred, and the nationality of 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 a frugal and industrious race. 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

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