colonists devoted themselves to tillage, and raised food enough, or nearly enough, for the whole city. A larger portion within the walls applied themselves to the mechanic arts and to commerce, exchanging their manufactured goods for food, either with their own agricultural citizens, or with the native inhabitants of the soil, when they could open peaceful intercourse with them, or with the denizens of other shores, perhaps of the mother country, to which they sent their ships. As they needed only a narrow strip of territory, which they often obtained by fair purchase from the aborigines, the hostility of the latter was not excited; and the mutual benefits of trade being soon felt, the natives came to regard the colonists as their benefactors and best friends. A knowledge of the arts, a taste for the comforts and luxuries of life, learning and religion, were thus diffused among them; and in their simplicity and gratitude, they often reverenced the authors of their civilization as superhuman beings, and paid them divine honors. Many, if not most, of the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology were originally only the founders of art-bringing, knowledge-and-religion-diffusing colonies, whose beneficent influence, handed down to grateful remembrance by tradition,- by the spoken, not the written word,- really seemed to admiring posterity divine. The colony, the city, was opulent and refined from the beginning; founded by the most enterprising citizens of the mother country, who brought their wealth, their cultivated tastes, and their industrious and adventurous habits along with them, it became almost at once a rival of the parent city in learning, industry, and the arts. Temples and theatres were built; the drama flourished; schools of eloquence were established; manufactures of costly and elegant fabrics were begun; and commerce started into life with all the vigor of youth and the large resources of manhood. Brief as this sketch is, the classical reader will recognize in it, I think, the principal features of those colonies which the Phoenicians established along the northern shore of Africa, the Greeks along the coasts of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Magna Græcia or Southern Italy, and the Romans in Gaul and Spain. Carthage, the great commercial and manufacturing city of ancient times, the rival of Rome, may be taken in its history as a type of them all; and in the fanciful picture which, many years after its destruction, the Roman poet drew of its supposed origin, of the scene which it presented while the walls of the city were building, we recognize what was the idea, even so late as Virgil's time, of the mode of founding a colony.* Modern colonies, on the other hand, are, from the outset, dependencies of the mother country, to which they constantly look for protection and support. They are often planted by those who do not intend to reside there permanently, but simply wish to gather again in a new country the wealth which they have dissipated in an old one, and then to return to their former home in order to enjoy it. Thus relieved from all fear of attack from the aborigines, their first care is to get possession of as much land as possible, this being the most obvious and plentiful source of riches. Individuals or joint-stock companies obtain grants of land measured by the league; and their rapacity provokes the vengeance of the natives, at the same time that it leads to their own isolation and defencelessness. The territory which they acquire is out of all proportion to their wants, their physical strength, or their capital; they cultivate only here and there a very fertile spot, where the powers of the soil are soon spent by a succession of exhausting crops; and in the careless style of agriculture to which they become accustomed, through their dependence on the extent and natural richness of their land, is soon lost all remembrance of the * "Conveniunt, quibus aut odium crudele tyranni, Taurino quantum possent circumdare tergo. agricultural art and science which they brought with them from their old home. Widely separated from each other, amply supplied with food by the bounty of nature, but destitute of the manufactured articles on which depend the comforts and even the decencies of life, out of the reach of the law, and beyond the sphere of education, they rapidly approximate the condition of the savages whom they have just dispossessed. They become "squatters," "bushmen," "backwoodsmen," whose only enjoyments are hunting and intoxication, whose only schoolroom is the forest, and whose sense of justice is manifested only by the processes of Lynch law. They are doomed to the solitary, violent, brutal existence, which destroys all true civilization, all sympathy with other men, though it increases strength of body, adroitness, courage, and the spirit of adventure. The want of local attachments, and an insatiable thirst for wandering and adventure, are, I fear, the most striking traits in the character of the whole population of our Mississippi valley. Their homes even in that fair region are but homes of yesterday; they had only pitched their camps on the banks of the Ohio and the Wabash, while on their way to the Sacramento and the Columbia. The truant disposition which carried them over the Alleghanies, hurries them onward to the Rocky Mountains. I do not go so far as an eminent thinker of our own day, who has expressed in eloquent language his fears lest these constant migrations should lead our countrymen back to barbarism; but it is certain that the "pioneers of civilization," as they have been fondly called, leave laws, education, and the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them. They may be the means of partially civilizing others, but they are in great danger of brutalizing themselves. Strangely enough, the only colony of modern times founded on the principles which governed the ancients in the establishment of their colonies is one commenced by a set of halfcrazed fanatics in our own far-distant territory of Utah or Deseret. Here, as well as at their former place of settlement in Illinois, the Mormons appear to have begun their colony by founding a city, within or near which their whole population is to be collected, so that the mechanic arts and all branches of manufacture may be established at the same time that they make their first attempts in agriculture. The name of their present chief city in Deseret is New Hierusalem, and it is situated on the right bank of the Western Jordan, which empties into their Dead Sea. I borrow the following account of it from an Historical Discourse, delivered some years since, by Thomas L. Kane. "Its houses are spread, to command as much as possible the farms, which are laid out in wards or cantons, with a common fence to each ward. The farms in wheat already cover a space greater than the District of Columbia, over all of which they have completed the canals and other arrangements for bountiful irrigation, after the manner of the cultivators of the East. The houses are distributed over an area nearly as large as the city of New York. They will soon have completed a large common storehouse and granary, and a great-sized public bathhouse. One of the many wonderful thermal springs of the valley, a white sulphur water of the temperature of 102° Fahrenheit, with a head of the thickness of a man's body,' they have already brought into the town for this purpose." It is remarkable, that one of the latest improvements or discoveries in economical science, Mr. Wakefield's theory of colonization, consists in the recognition of the fact, that the ancient mode of planting colonies is far preferable to the modern one. Mr. Wakefield perceived that a country cannot have a productive agriculture unless it has a large town population, who may supply the agriculturists with manufactured articles, while the agriculturists supply them with food. Both parties are thus furnished with a market for their surplus produce, and with the articles that they most need in exchange for it. He showed that the modern fashion of establishing new settlements,"setting down a number of families side by side, each on its own piece of land, and all employing themselves in exactly the same manner, - though, under favorable circumstances, it may assure to those families a rude abundance of mere necessaries, can never be other than unfavorable to great production or rapid growth." The situation of Oregon hardly ten years ago affords a striking illustration of this truth; the settlers, for want of a market, were obliged to feed their horses with the finest wheat, while their own dwellings were nearly destitute of all the comforts of life. Wakefield's "system consists of ar rangements for securing that every colony shall have, from the first, a town population bearing due proportion to its agricultural, and that the cultivators of the soil shall not be so widely scattered as to be deprived by distance of the benefit of that town population as a market for their produce." When land was plenty and free immigrants scarce in New Holland, the government found it convenient to make liberal gifts of territory; and accordingly, tracts varying in size from 10,000 to 50,000 acres were granted to various individuals. I borrow from the North American Review a brief outline of the system. Mr. Wakefield argued thus:-"The welfare of any community depends very much upon such a division of labor as shall fill every trade, profession, and employment with good men, and not overload any of them. If land in any country is so cheap that all are able to become landholders, there will be no laborers, no farm-hands, or mechanics; a semi-barbarism will follow; no growth in wealth or civilization will take place, and the country will be stationary or retrograde. If, therefore, you would have a colony progressive and civilized, you must put your lands so high as to keep a proper proportion of the inhabitants in the labor-market seeking employment, and yet not so high as to prevent as many from buying real estate as can use it to advantage with the help of such laborers. If, then, England wishes Australia to grow in riches and goodness, let her sell the lands at a fixed price, never taking less, and in fixed quantities, never selling less; and let her apply the revenue arising from these sales to the transportation of free, honest laborers to the points where they are needed. In this way, the labor-market of New Holland will be supplied; the expense of supplying working hands will be paid by the lands of the colony; no more land will be taken up than can be worked to advantage; population will be concentrated, wealth will accumulate, and knowledge and virtue advance." Mr. Wakefield's theory was good, but a practical difficulty obstructed its application. The government, adopting his views, put their lands up to a high price; and the immigrants, consequently, instead of purchasing them, or of remaining as laborers on the lands purchased by others, pushed farther into the interior, and "squatted" on the best land they could find, without paying anything. In those vast unsettled regions, |