pushed along the jagged, tempestuous coasts, till they struck the icy barriers of the pole. Their commerce was cultivated, against the jealousy of the English legislation, till, in Burke's time, you see to what it had grown. They had to establish their own free schools; to found and enlarge their needed colleges; to supply themselves with such literature at home as could be produced, in the pauses of their prodigious labor; to import from the old world what their small means enabled them to buy.

*

They had their chartered liberties to maintain, against Royal hostility, in the face of governors who hindered and threatened, if they did not-like Andros-compel the clerks of their assemblies to write "Finis" midway on the records. So it happened to them, according to Milton's ideal plan for a perfect education. "The next remove," he says, "must be to the study of politics; to know the beginning, end, and reason of political societies; that they may not, in a dangerous fit of the Commonwealth, be such poor, shaken, uncertain reeds, of such a tottering conscience, as many of our great counselors have lately showed themselves, but steadfast pillars of the State." The plain men who had come here from Europe, and who had before them a

*"His Excellency, Sir Edmund Andros, Knight, Captain-General and Governor of his Majesty's Territory and Dominion in New England, by order from his Majesty, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the 31st of October, 1687, took into his hands the government of this colony of Connecticut, it being by his Majesty annexed to the Massachusetts and other Colonies, under his Excellency's government. FINIS." Secretary's Allyn's record; quoted by Palfrey, vol. 3, P. 545.

Military training of the Colonists.

wilderness to be conquered, were trained according to this generous philosophy. A large practical sovereignty had to be in their hands, from the beginning, for their self-preservation. They established offices, enacted laws, organized a militia, waged war, coined money; and the lessons which they learned, of legislative prudence, administrative skill, bore abundant fruit in that final Revolution which did not spring from accident or from passion, which was born of debate, which was shaped by ideas, and which vindicated itself by majestic State-papers.

Their military tuition was as constant as their work. Against the Indians, against the French, somewhere or other, as we look back, they seem to have been always in arms-so uncertain and brief were their intervals of peace. Not always threatened violence to themselves, sometimes the remote collisions and entanglements of European politics, involved them in these wars-as in that great one which commenced in the question of the Austrian Succession, and which swept through our untrodden woods its trail of fire; when, as Macaulay says of Frederick, "that he might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coasts of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America." Precisely as the colonies grew, any power hostile to Great Britain was incited to attack them. At some point or other, therefore, the straggling and interrupted line of their scanty possessions was

lighted with conflagration, vocal with volleys, dripping with blood, down almost to the day of the Revolution.

But from this incessant martial training came practised skill in the use of weapons, a cool courage, a supreme self-reliance, the temper which looks from many portraits, which faced emergencies without a fear, and whose fire withered the British ranks at Concord-bridge and on Breed's-hill.

There is not much that is picturesque in the annals which cover the hundred years after New Amsterdam became New York. They look, to the world, perhaps to us, for the most part, common-place. Volcanic regions are the more picturesque in landscape forms, because of the sudden violence of the forces which have shattered and reset them. The legends cling to rugged peaks. The pinnacles of Pilatus incessantly attract them, while they slide from the smoother slopes of Righi. So a convulsive and violent history, full of reäction, fracture, catastrophe, appeals to the imagination as one never does that is quiet and gradual, where a people moves forward in steady advance, and the sum of its accomplishment is gradually built of many particulars. There was not much in the career of the colonists, in the hundred years before the Revolution, which poetry would be moved to celebrate, or whose attractive pictorial aspects the painter would make haste to sketch.

But the discipline answered its purpose better than

The severe Discipline salutary.

if it had been pictorial, tragic. It was apt to the inborn temper of the colonists. It fortified in them that hardy and resolute moral life which they had brought. It guarded the forces which were their birthright from waste and loss. The colony of Surinam, under tropical skies--where mahogany was a firewood, and the Tonquin-bean, with its swift sweetness, perfumed the air; where sugar and spices are produced without limit, and coffee and cotton have returned to the planter two crops a year--this seemed, at the time, a prodigal recompense for the colony of New Netherland. But Guiana demoralized the men who possessed it; while the harder work, under harsher heavens, gave an empire to those who adhered to these coasts. No unbought luxuries became to them as dazzling and deadly Sabine gifts. No lazy and voluptuous life, as of tropical islands, dissolved their manhood. Their little wealth was wrested from the wilderness, or won from the seas; and the cost of its acquirement measured its permanence. They were, as a people, honest and chaste, because they were workers. Their ways might be rough, their slang perhaps strong. But no prevalence among them of a prurient fiction inflamed their passions; no fescennine plays blanched the bloom of their modesty. Their discipline was Spartan, not Athenian; but it made their life robust and sound. The sharp hellebore cleansed their heads for a more discerning practical sense. They never had to meet what Carlyle declares the present practi

cal problem of governments: "given, a world of knaves, to educe an honesty from their united action."

As their numbers increased, and their industry became various, the sense of independence on foreign countries was constantly nurtured. The feeling of inward likeness and sympathy among themselves, the tendencies to combine in an organic union, grew always more earnest. Patriotism was intensified into a passion; since, if any people owned their lands, certainly they did, who had hewn out their spaces amid the woods, had purchased them not with wampum but with work, had fertilized them with their own blood. And, at last, trained by labor and by war, by edu cational influences, Christian teachings, legislative responsibilities, commercial success, at last, the spirit which they had brought, which in Europe had been resisted and thwarted until its force was largely broken, but which here had not died, and had not declined, but had continued diffused as a common life among them all,—this made their separate establishment in the world a necessity of the time. "Monarchy unaccountable is the worst sort of tyranny, and least of all to be endured by free-born men "—that was a maxim of Aristotle's politics, twenty centuries before their Congress. It had been repeated and emphasized by Milton, while the ancestors of those assembled in the Congress were fighting for freedom across the seas.* Holland had believed it, * Milton had added other words, in the same great discourse of Lib