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spirit of English liberty. They had forsaken one home for it, and without it no place would have looked to them like home. It was their inspiration, their guide, and their comforter, interwoven with all their habits and thoughts and feelings, and inseparable from their conception of duty to themselves, to their children, and to their Maker.

The spirit of English liberty is not an abstract conception, logically deduced from fundamental principles, and applied to the practice and purposes of life. Neither is it a sentiment, reaching the feelings through the imagination, and giving its coloring to thought because it had already been speculatively combined with action. It is an instinctive conviction, confirmed by reason, deep, ever present and ever active. You find it first in the forests of Germany, an absolute individuality, unlike anything that the Greek or Roman world had ever seen; strong-willed, self-dependent, spurning involuntary control, yet submitting cheerfully to the consequences of its own acts. Thence it crosses the seas as a conqueror, and suffering, as conquerors generally do, from the completeness of its own triumph, it relaxes somewhat of its vigor, passes through many vicissitudes, and, having survived the associations both of its origin and its transmigration, comes out, with all the freshness of its youth about it, in the meadow of Runnymede.

Here it entered upon a new phase of existence; a phase which gradually developed all its character

istic traits, strengthening and purifying it till it became the most perfect conciliation which the world had yet seen of the rights of the individual with the rights of society. And this was the form which it had assumed when our fathers first brought it to these shores, where for forty years it was allowed to grow at will, and had already penetrated every part of the new society, before the guardians of the old bethought them of taking it under their protection.

The first fruit of this protection was the Act of Navigation, so long celebrated as the masterpiece of statesmanship, and so tenaciously clung to as the bulwark of England's commercial prosperity. The foundation, indeed, had been laid by the Long Parliament, and confirmed by the courts of Westminster. But it was not until Charles II. had entered upon his career of profligacy and corruption, that the Colonists began to feel the chains. gradually tightening around their commerce, and contracting the sphere of their industry. First came a five per cent duty upon exports and imports; then the great Act itself, closing their ports to every flag but that of England, restricting the pursuit of commerce to native or naturalized subjects, and prohibiting the exportation of certain "enumerated articles, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, wool, ginger, or dye-woods," produced in the Colonies, to any country but England. Still the Colonies grew and prospered, and still the jealous

watchfulness of the mother country kept pace with their increasing prosperity. As new branches of industry were opened, new shackles were forged, and every fresh product of their enterprise was promptly added to the lists of prohibition. The Navigation Act, in its enlarged form, was passed in 1660; in 1763 it had woven its toils around American enterprise in twenty-nine separate acts, each breathing its spirit and enforcing its claims.

It is not difficult to imagine the feelings with which these acts were received. Open resistance, indeed, was impossible, and remonstrance would have been unavailing. Still the obedience that was rendered wore oftener the air of remonstrance than of cheerful acquiescence; and although the right was generally conceded, the exercise of it excited bickerings and heart-burnings that gradually prepared the way for independence. The enterprising spirit itself could not be repressed; and smuggling, its natural outlet, became almost as reputable, and far more profitable, than regular trade.

Thus the relation of England to her Colonies, which might have been a relation of mutual good offices, became, on her part, a mere business relation, founded upon the principle of capital and labor, and conducted with a single eye to her own interests. They formed for her a market of consumption and supply, consuming large quantities of her manufactures, and supplying her, at the

lowest rates, with many objects that she required for her own consumption. What they sent out as raw material, she returned prepared for use. Her ship-owners grew rich as they carried the sure freight to and fro. Her manufactures gave free play to their spirit of enterprise, for their market was secured to them by a rigorous monopoly. She had the exclusive right of buying, and therefore bought upon her own terms; the exclusive right of selling, and therefore set her own prices. If with all these restrictions and obstacles the Colonies still continued to grow in wealth and strength, it was because in a new country, where land was cheap, the spirit of industry could not be crushed from a distance of three thousand miles by the spirit of monopoly.

Still the feeling engendered by this relation was not of a kind to make it lasting. That of the Americans was distrust and suspicion, strangely mixed up with filial reverence, an instinctive sense of injury, instantly met by the instinctive suggestion, that there must be some constitutional reason for doing it, or it would not be done. That of England was summed up with somewhat more of concision than of elegance in Attorney-General Seymor's reply to Commissioner Blair. Pleading warmly for a moderate enlargement of the moderate allowance to the churches of Virginia, "Consider, sir," said the pious commissioner, "that the people of Virginia have souls to save." "Damn

your souls!" was the ready answer; bacco."

"make to

A second cause, equally active, and in its effects equally powerful with the first, was English ignorance of America. Nothing alienates man from man more surely than the want of mutual appreciation. Sympathy founded upon respect for our feelings, and a just estimate of our worth, is one of the earliest cravings of the human heart. It begins with our first recognition of existence, imparting an irresistible eloquence to the eye and to the lips of infancy. It grows with our youth, and, as we rise into manhood, finds new strength in reason and experience, teaching us in their daily lessons that without it there can be no sure foundation for the purest and noblest sentiments of our nature. It is the only feeling which can reconcile us to that condition of mutual dependence in which it has pleased our Maker to place us in this life; and working, as all the feelings which he has implanted in our breasts work, for the accomplishment of its appropriate end, it cherishes in the harmonious co-operation of fellowcitizens the germ of that beneficent concurrence of human wills and human desires, which, in God's chosen time, will become the brotherhood of the nations.

Few Englishmen had accurate ideas of the nature, the extent, or even the position of the Colonies. And when the Duke of Newcastle hurried

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