severe morals, and their ardent love of civil and religious liberty. He has not overstated the value of the services which Puritanism has rendered to mankind in the following contrast with chivalry.

"Historians have loved to eulogize the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the Puritans from the fear of God. The knights were proud of loyalty, the Puritans of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honour, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the Puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in outward show, favoured pleasure, multiplied amusements, and degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes; Puritanism bridled the passions, commended the virtues of self-denial, and rescued the name of men from dishonour. The former valued courtesy; the latter justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually-increasing weight and knowledge and opulence of the industrious classes; the Puritans, relying upon those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty."-Vol. i. p. 468.

The colony of Massachusetts resembled that of Virginia, inasmuch as an organized political body grew out of a commercial corporation; but in every other respect they stood in marked contrast to each other. The soil and climate of Virginia furnished easy and abundant means of subsistence, and cherished in its inhabitants an indolent and Epicurean character; the New Englander had to contend with an ungenial climate and a soil which though not ungrateful is not naturally of high fertility. Riches which offered themselves to the southern planter with little labour of his own, by means of bondsmen and negro slaves, was earned with toil and danger by the New Englander, from fisheries and the navigation of a stormy ocean. The spirit of Independency which carried to the utmost limit the rejection of hierarchical authority, and made every man a judge for himself in his highest spiritual concerns, disposes him to equal boldness in the maintenance of his civil rights; Episcopacy teaches acquiescence,

subordination, and a right to command independent of the choice of the governed. General education was one of the first means which the Puritans of New England employed to train up a race who should be able to defend and enjoy liberty. "To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, it was ordered in 1647, that every township after the Lord had increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a grammar-school, being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University." The governor of Virginia rejoiced that they had no such thing as a grammar-school among them, and trusted that they should have none for a hundred years to come. In Virginia the Church had little influence on the State; the religious enthusiasm which had founded the New England Colonies blended religion most intimately with all the affairs of life, and gave the ministers a predominant influence in matters which lay beyond their sphere. Originally only church members enjoyed the elective franchise; the ministers were the counsellors of the community in political affairs, drew up state papers, and went on embassies. This religious zeal and clerical influence was the cause of some of the least creditable events in New England history. When Roger Williams promulgated the doctrine that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never punish heretical opinion, the zealots of New England cast him out, declaring any one to be worthy of banishment who should assert that the magistrate might not intermeddle, even to stop a church. from apostacy; and he was compelled to withdraw to Rhode Island, to found there the first community in which the rights of conscience were recognized in all their amplitude. Laws were enacted against blasphemy; absence from public worship was punished by fines; Baptists were fined and whipped; Quakers were banished on pain of death. The disgraceful proceedings in the matter of the New England witches were urged on by the ministers, who charged with Sadducism every one who denied this manifest work of the devil. It would be uncandid not to ac

knowledge, that in a community which needed the bond of a common and firm religious faith, to resist the many causes which tended to its dissolution, jealousy of schism was more excusable than in states and churches whose power is fully confirmed. Happily, intolerance was not established by unchangeable laws; the excess of Puritanical zeal was tempered by the progress of knowledge, and there remained only enough to make New England conspicuous among the states of the Union for morality, internal order, and ardent love of liberty.

Every one of the great sections of the American community was founded under circumstances which gave it a permanent character, more or less distinct from that of its neighbours. The Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Dutch settlers in the New Netherlands, all stood in some respects in strong contrast with the people of Virginia or Massachusetts. We can notice specially only the history of Carolina, whose first code of laws is connected with the illustrious name of Locke. Carolina had been granted in the reign of Charles II., a reign, as Mr. Bancroft observes, not less remarkable for the rapacity of the courtiers than for the debauchery of the monarch, to Clarendon, and Monk, and the Lords Craven and Ashley Cooper, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been constituted, with some others, its proprietors and immediate sovereigns. Two years afterwards they obtained a still more enormous grant, "comprising all the territory of North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, much of Florida and Missouri, nearly all Texas, and a large portion of Mexico." Within these limits they had not only general powers of legislation, with the consent of the future free inhabitants, but were specially empowered to erect cities and manors, counties and baronies, and establish orders of nobility, provided they had other than English titles. No doubt at the court of Charles II. the recent overthrow of the Commonwealth had produced a conviction, that all republican government was to come to an end, with a determination not to allow it to raise its head in any new settlement, and to undermine it in the old. Shaftesbury, whose character is drawn with discrimination and power

by Mr. Bancroft, and in more favourable colours than by most English historians,* was commissioned to draw up a constitution for this nascent empire in the West; and he called Locke to his aid-Locke, whose steady friendship for him is one of the strongest presumptions that common opinion has done him injustice. The preface to this constitution declares it to be the object to give the new state a monarchical character, in harmony with the monarchy of which it was to be a part, and to prevent the growth of too numerous a democracy. The proprietaries formed a close corporation of eight, and their number could never be increased; the dignity was hereditary, or, in default of heirs, perpetuated by self-election. Two orders of nobility were created; one landgrave or earl, two caciques or barons, for each county. Tenants holding ten acres of land at a fixed rent were to be adscripts to the soil, and without political franchise, which could not be conferred on a freehold of less than 50 acres, nor with less than 500 could a man sit in Parliament. The constitution of this Parliament was curiously complex, and designed to secure aristocratical predominance: the estates assembled in one chamber; but no subject could be proposed except through the council of the proprietaries, who had thus secured to them a negative before debate. That a man of such enlarged views as Locke should have proposed this constitution for a colony, can only be accounted for from the horror of democracy, which the result of its triumph in England had produced. That he should have believed it possible, by such arbitrary and artificial arrangements, to maintain an aristocratic government in America, amidst colonies already so far advanced in the opposite direction, may seem an impeachment of his sagacity, especially to those who have the advantage of judging after the event. But we do not understand the connexion which Mr. Bancroft endeavours to establish between these aristocratic tendencies, and the metaphysical principles of Locke; his comparing the soul to a sheet of white paper, his believing conscience to be nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions, or infinity an idea

* Mr. William Belsham is one of the few who have spoken favourably of Shaftesbury. See the Note to his Introduction to his History, vol. i. p. 87. No doubt Hume's character of him is grossly unfair.

CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 40.

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derived from the senses, purely negative, and belonging only to space, duration and number. He has elaborately contrasted his philosophical opinions with those of Penn, whom he regards as a Transcendentalist by anticipation, and the Constitutions for Carolina with the code which the Inward Voice dictated to the founder of Pennsylvania.* Now this inward voice is nothing else than the suggestions of wisdom or the impulse of feeling and conscience. We do all honour to the benevolence of Penn, but we believe Locke's to have been equally pure, and that he was fully persuaded that he was giving the plan of a constitution which would most effectually promote the happiness of those who lived under it. Penn founded a colony, the nucleus of which was a community among whom distinction of ranks was already abjured; to have endeavoured to re-establish it, would have been a manifest absurdity. Locke's constitution was soon laid aside; but except democratic equality, what else of the principles of Penn has remained in the state which bears his name?

The seeds of the dissolution of the union between England and her American colonies were sown almost from their origin. The relation of parent and child was rather a figure of speech than a description of the mutual feeling of the parties; the mother country sought primarily her own profit, and the prosperity of the colony only as the means of increasing that profit. Hence, first of all, royal monopoly; Charles I. claimed the pre-emption of all the tobacco of Virginia; then commercial monopoly; no ship laden with colonial commodities might sail from her harbours for any ports but those of England; then the Navigation Act, compelling the colonists to employ only English shipping for the transport of their produce. The parent soon became jealous lest the child should grow too rapidly to manhood. "Massachusetts," said Sir Joshua Child, "is the most prejudicial plantation of Great Britain; the frugality, industry, and temperance of its people and the happiness of their laws and institutions promise them long life and a wonderful increase of people, riches, and power." The Revolution in England, which was accompanied with a great increase of influence to the mercantile classes, made her policy towards the American colo* Vol. ii. p. 377, foll.