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to the King with the information that Cape Breton was an island, he did what perhaps half his colleagues in the ministry, and more than half his colleagues in Parliament, would have done in his place. They knew that the Colonies were of vast extent; that they lay far away beyond the sea; that they produced many things which Englishmen wanted to buy, and consumed many things which Englishmen wanted to sell; that English soldiers had met England's hereditary enemies, the French, in their forests; that English sailors had beaten French sailors on their coasts. But they did not know that the most flourishing of these Colonies had been planted by men who, prizing freedom above all other blessings, had planted them in order to secure for themselves and their children a home in which they could worship God according to their own idea of worship, and put forth the strength of their minds and of their bodies according to their own conception of what was best for them here and hereafter.

Hence, the ideas awakened by the mention of plantations were not ideas of brotherhood and sympathy, but of investment and gain. Like landlords who receive their rents through an agent, without seeing or caring to see the farm that produces, or the men who make it productive, they merely counted their money, and asked why there was not more of it. And when more came, it was welcomed as a proof that there was still more to come:

that the soil had not yet been made to pay its full tribute; that a little more care, a little more watchfulness, a little more exaction, would multiply its increase many fold; and that every attempt to turn that increase to the advantage of the laborers was a fraud upon the state.

It was known, also, that from time to time criminals had been sent to the plantations as an alternative, if not an equivalent, for the dungeon or the gallows; - and what to many minds seemed hardly less heinous, that men too poor to pay their passage across the ocean had often sold themselves into temporary servitude, in the hope of finding a home in which they might eat in security the bread which they had earned in the sweat of their brows. Philosophers, too, comparing the animals of the two worlds, had discovered that America was incapable of producing the same vigorous race which had carried civilization so far in Europe; and that, whatever might be the grandeur of her mountains, the vastness of her lakes, and the majesty of her rivers, the man that was born among them must gradually degenerate both morally and physically into an inferior being.

And thus, when the eye of his kindred beyond the ocean was first turned upon him, the American colonist already appeared as an inferior, condemned to labor in a lower sphere, and cut off by Nature herself from all those higher aspirations which ennoble the soul that cherishes them. His success

awakened no pride; his filial reverence called in vain for maternal affection. The hand that had been held out in cordial welcome to the English stranger in America, found no respondent grasp when the American stranger returned to visit the home of his fathers in England. With a heart overflowing with love, with a memory stored with traditions, with an imagination warmed by tales and descriptions that began in the nursery ballad, and led by easy transitions to Shakespeare and Milton, with a mind elevated by the examples of English history and the precepts of English philosophy, he was received with the repulsive coldness of English reserve, and the haughty condescension of English pride. Had it not been that man is never so set in his opinions as when he takes them up in order to reconcile his conscience to a prejudice, the best minds of England would have seen that America had soon produced minds fully able to cope with theirs on their strongest ground. But the choicest lessons of experience were thrown away. From generation to generation the galling insult was repeated; and still the Colonist loved the land whose language he spoke, and revered the institutions from which he had drawn his own ideas of the duties of the sovereign and the rights of the subject. But already the work of alienation was begun, and every new demonstration of English prejudice was like the loosening of another of the "hooks of steel" which had once grappled

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the land of his forefathers to the "soul" of the American.

A third cause is found in the nature of the institutions, and more particularly of the municipal institutions, which the Colonists brought with them. For institutions have their nature, like human beings, and will as consistently and as inevitably work it out. Society is a soil whereon no seed falls in vain. Years, and even centuries, may pass before the tender germ makes its slow way to the light. But grow it must, and thrive and bear its fruit; and not merely fruit for the day, but fruit producing a new, though kindred seed, which, passing through the same changes, will lead in due time to a new and kindred growth.

The English colonial system was false from the beginning,-formed in erroneous conceptions of the laws of national prosperity, and the relations of sovereign and subject. But still it was, in part, an error common to all the countries which had planted colonies in America, all of whom had carried it into their colonial policy, and done battle for it by land and by sea. Even Montesquieu, when he discovered the long-lost title-deeds of humanity, failed to discover amongst them, in distinct specification, the title-deeds of colonial rights.

But in the application of this erroneous system, the superiority of a free over a despotic government was manifest. English colonies prospered in a cold climate, and on a meagre soil, as French and

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Spanish colonies never prospered under mild skies, and with a soil that almost anticipated the labors of the husbandman. This superiority, and not the protection of her armies and fleets, was the enduring though unconscious service which England rendered to America. Her colonists were the free sons of fathers so accustomed to freedom that they held life as of little worth without it; and so trained by their municipal institutions to the forms of selfgovernment, that even rebellion assumed the garb of order, and resistance to constituted authority moved with the precision and regularity of legal action.

imperial city to the sum

And here, permit me at the risk of a digression to remind you of the important part which municipal institutions have ever borne in the history of civilization. The natural growth of every generous soil, we find them in Italy at the dawn of history, and we find them still there through all its manifold vicissitudes. They gave energy to the long struggle with Rome. They nourished the strength which bore the mit of glory and power. inroad of the barbarians, appearing even in the darkest hour of the tempest like fragments of some noble ship, to which the survivors of the wreck still cling with trembling hands, in the fond hope that the winds may yet cease and the ocean rest from its heavings. Need I remind you of those republics of the Middle Ages, which, gathering up

They survived the great

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