... 217, 218
Ambuscade at Bloody Brook ... 219

Popular excitement in Boston ... 220

The Narragansetts prepare to take the war-path ... 221

And Governor Winslow leads an army against them ... 222, 223

Storming of the great swamp fortress ... 224

Slaughter of the Indians ... 225

Effect of the blow ... 226

Growth of the humane sentiment in recent times, due to the fact that the
horrors of war are seldom brought home to everybody's door ... 227, 228

Warfare with savages is likely to be truculent in character ... 229

Attack upon Lancaster ... 230

Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative ... 231-233

Virtual extermination of the Indians (February to August, 1676) ... 233,
234

Death of Canonchet ... 234

Philip pursued by Captain Church ... 235

Death of Philip ... 236

Indians sold into slavery ... 237

Conduct of the Christian Indians ... 238

War with the Tarratines ... 239

Frightful destruction of life and property ... 240

Henceforth the red man figures no more in the history of New England,
except in frontier raids under French guidance ... 241


CHAPTER VI.

THE TYRANNY OF ANDROS.

Romantic features in the early history of New England ... 242

Captain Edward Johnson, of Woburn, and his book on "The Wonder-working
Providence of Zion's Saviour in New England" ... 243,244

Acts of the Puritans often judged by an unreal and impossible standard
... 245

Spirit of the "Wonder-working Providence" ... 246

Merits and faults of the Puritan theocracy ... 247

Restriction of the suffrage to church members ... 248

It was a source of political discontent ... 249

Inquisitorial administration of justice ... 250

The "Half way Covenant" ... 251

Founding of the Old South church ... 252

Unfriendly relations between Charles II and Massachusetts ... 253

Complaints against Massachusetts ... 254

The Lords of Trade ... 255

Arrival of Edward Randolph in Boston ... 256

Joseph Dudley and the beginnings of Toryism in New England ... 257, 258

Charles II. erects the four Piscataqua towns into the royal province of
New Hampshire ... 259

And quarrels with Massachusetts over the settlement of the Gorges claim
to the Maine district ... 260

Simon Bradstreet and his verse-making wife ... 261

Massachusetts answers the king's peremptory message ... 262

Secret treaty between Charles II. and Louis XIV ... 263

Shameful proceedings in England ... 264

Massachusetts refuses to surrender her charter; and accordingly it is
annulled by decree of chancery, June 21, 1684 ... 265

Effect of annulling the charter ... 266

Death of Charles II, accession of James II., and appointment of Sir
Edmund Andros as viceroy over New England, with despotic powers ... 267

The charter oak ... 268

Episcopal services in Boston ... 268, 269

Founding of the King's Chapel ... 269

The tyranny ... 270

John Wise of Ipswich ... 271

Fall of James II ... 271

Insurrection in Boston, and overthrow of Andros ... 272

Effects of the Revolution of 1689 ... 273

Need for union among all the northern colonies ... 274

Plymouth, Maine, and Acadia annexed to Massachusetts ... 275

Which becomes a royal province ... 276

And is thus brought into political sympathy with Virginia ... 276

The seeds of the American Revolution were already sown, and the spirit
of 1776 was foreshadowed in 1689 ... 277, 278




THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND.




CHAPTER I.

THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA.


It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the
facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and
comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even
suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date
476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was
in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the
Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of
Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne
to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly
pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a
world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome,
and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration
remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century
had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which
historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended,
as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up
as a great landmark dividing modern from ancient history. For those,
however, who took such a view, it was impossible to see the events of
the Middle Ages in their true relations to what went before and what
came after. It was impossible to understand what went on in Italy in
the sixth century, or to explain the position of that great Roman power
which had its centre on the Bosphorus, which in the code of Justinian
left us our grandest monument of Roman law, and which for a thousand
years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against the successive
aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to
understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of
the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England
to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the
modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman
Empire come to an end?]

Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has
undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same
time affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts
distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to
comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown
fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to
recover historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion.
Such an instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr.
Bryce's epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then
historians still recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which
left the Bishop of Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the
shifting of the political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the
Lateran. This was one of those subtle changes which escape notice until
after some of their effects have attracted attention. The most important
effect, in this instance, realized after three centuries, was not the
overthrow of Roman power in the West, but its indefinite extension and
expansion. The men of 476 not only had no idea that they were entering
upon a new era, but least of all did they dream that the Roman Empire
had come to an end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged,
its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was
something without which the men of those days could not imagine the
world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in
one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it
was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at
Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a
message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth,
and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of
patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when
Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he
was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from
the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.

[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in
political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying
out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic
life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly
slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates.
The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the
prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria,
on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by
London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most
interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much
more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must
acquire a knowledge of the drifts and tendencies of human thought and
feeling and action from the earliest ages to the times in which we
live. In covering so wide a field we cannot of course expect to obtain
anything like complete results. In order to make a statement simple
enough to be generally intelligible, it is necessary to pass over many
circumstances and many considerations that might in one way and another
qualify what we have to say. Nevertheless it is quite possible for us to
discern, in their bold general outlines, some historic truths of supreme
importance. In contemplating the salient features of the change which
has now for a long time been making the world more English and less
Roman, we shall find not only intellectual pleasure and profit but
practical guidance. For in order to understand this slow but mighty
change, we must look a little into that process of nation-making which
has been going on since prehistoric ages and is going on here among us
to-day, and from the recorded experience of men in times long past
we may gather lessons of infinite value for ourselves and for our
children's children. As in all the achievements of mankind it is only
after much weary experiment and many a heart-sickening failure that
success is attained, so has it been especially with nation-making. Skill
in the political art is the fruit of ages of intellectual and moral
discipline; and just as picture-writing had to come before printing and
canoes before steamboats, so the cruder political methods had to be
tried and found wanting, amid the tears and groans of unnumbered
generations, before methods less crude could be put into operation. In
the historic survey upon which we are now to enter, we shall see that
the Roman Empire represented a crude method of nation-making which began
with a masterful career of triumph over earlier and cruder methods, but
has now for several centuries been giving way before a more potent and
satisfactory method. And just as the merest glance at the history of
Europe shows us Germanic peoples wresting the supremacy from Rome, so in
this deeper study we shall discover a grand and far-reaching Teutonic
Idea of political life overthrowing and supplanting the Roman Idea. Our
attention will be drawn toward England as the battle-ground and the
seventeenth century as the critical moment of the struggle; we shall see
in Puritanism the tremendous militant force that determined the issue;
and when our perspective has thus become properly adjusted, we shall
begin to realize for the first time how truly wonderful was the age that
witnessed the Beginnings of New England. We have long had before our
minds the colossal figure of Roman Julius as "the foremost man of all
this world," but as the seventeenth century recedes into the past
the figure of English Oliver begins to loom up as perhaps even more
colossal. In order to see these world-events in their true perspective,
and to make perfectly clear the manner in which we are to estimate them,
we must go a long distance away from them. We must even go back, as
nearly as may be, to the beginning of things. [Sidenote: Gradual
shifting of primacy from the men who spoke Latin, and their descendants,
to the men who speak English]

If we look back for a moment to the primitive stages of society, we may
picture to ourselves the surface of the earth sparsely and scantily
covered with wandering tribes of savages, rude in morals and manners,
narrow and monotonous in experience, sustaining life very much as lower
animals sustain it, by gathering wild fruits or slaying wild game, and
waging chronic warfare alike with powerful beasts and with rival tribes
of men. [Sidenote: Political history is the history of nation-making]

In the widest sense the subject of political history is the description
of the processes by which, under favourable circumstances, innumerable
such primitive tribes have become welded together into mighty nations,
with elevated standards of morals and manners, with wide and varied
experience, sustaining life and ministering to human happiness by
elaborate arts and sciences, and putting a curb upon warfare by limiting
its scope, diminishing its cruelty, and interrupting it by intervals of
peace. The story, as laid before us in the records of three thousand
years, is fascinating and absorbing in its human interest for those who
content themselves with the study of its countless personal incidents,
and neglect its profound philosophical lessons. But for those who study
it in the scientific spirit, the human interest of its details becomes
still more intensely fascinating and absorbing. Battles and coronations,
poems and inventions, migrations and martyrdoms, acquire new meanings
and awaken new emotions as we begin to discern their bearings upon the
solemn work of ages that is slowly winning for humanity a richer and
more perfect life. By such meditation upon men's thoughts and deeds is
the understanding purified, till we become better able to comprehend our
relations to the world and the duty that lies upon each of us to shape
his conduct rightly.

In the welding together of primitive shifting tribes into stable and
powerful nations, we can seem to discern three different methods that
have been followed at different times and places, with widely different
results. In all cases the fusion has been effected by war, but it has
gone on in three broadly contrasted ways. The first of these methods,
which has been followed from time immemorial in the Oriental world, may
be roughly described as _conquest without incorporation._ A tribe grows
to national dimensions by conquering and annexing its neighbours,
without admitting them to a share in its political life. Probably there
is always at first some incorporation, or even perhaps some crude germ
of federative alliance; but this goes very little way,--only far enough
to fuse together a few closely related tribes, agreeing in speech and
habits, into a single great tribe that can overwhelm its neighbours. In
early society this sort of incorporation cannot go far without being
stopped by some impassable barrier of language or religion. After
reaching that point, the conquering tribe simply annexes its neighbours
and makes them its slaves. It becomes a superior caste, ruling over
vanquished peoples, whom it oppresses with frightful cruelty, while
living on the fruits of their toil in what has been aptly termed
Oriental luxury. Such has been the origin of many eastern despotisms, in
the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, and elsewhere. Such a political
structure admits of a very considerable development of material
civilization, in which gorgeous palaces and artistic temples may be
built, and perhaps even literature and scholarship rewarded, with money
wrung from millions of toiling wretches. There is that sort of brutal
strength in it, that it may endure for many long ages, until it comes
into collision with some higher civilization. Then it is likely to end
in sudden collapse, because the fighting quality of the people has
been destroyed. Populations that have lived for centuries in fear of
impalement or crucifixion, and have known no other destination for
the products of their labour than the clutches of the omnipresent
tax-gatherer, are not likely to furnish good soldiers. A handful of
freemen will scatter them like sheep, as the Greeks did twenty-three
centuries ago at Kynaxa, as the English did the other day at Tel
el-Kebir. On the other hand, where the manliness of the vanquished
people is not crushed, the sway of the conquerors who cannot enter into
political union with them is likely to be cast off, as in the case of
the Moors in Spain. There was a civilization in many respects admirable.
It was eminent for industry, science, art, and poetry; its annals are
full of romantic interest; it was in some respects superior to the
Christian system which supplanted it; in many ways it contributed
largely to the progress of the human race; and it was free from some
of the worst vices of Oriental civilizations. Yet because of the
fundamental defect that between the Christian Spaniard and his
Mussulman conqueror there could be no political fusion, this brilliant
civilization was doomed. During eight centuries of more or less
extensive rule in the Spanish peninsula, the Moor was from first to last
an alien, just as after four centuries the Turk is still an alien in
the Balkan peninsula. The natural result was a struggle that lasted
age after age till it ended in the utter extermination of one of the
parties, and left behind it a legacy of hatred and persecution that has
made the history of modern Spain a dismal record of shame and disaster.
[Sidenote: The Oriental method of nation-making]

In this first method of nation-making, then, which we may call the
Oriental method, one now sees but little to commend. It was better than
savagery, and for a long time no more efficient method was possible,
but the leading peoples of the world have long since outgrown it; and
although the resulting form of political government is the oldest we
know and is not yet extinct, it nevertheless has not the elements
of permanence. Sooner or later it will disappear, as savagery is
disappearing, as the rudest types of inchoate human society have
disappeared.

The second method by which nations have been made may be called
the Roman method; and we may briefly describe it as _conquest with
incorporation, but without representation_. The secret of Rome's
wonderful strength lay in the fact that she incorporated the vanquished
peoples into her own body politic. In the early time there was a fusion
of tribes going on in Latium, which, if it had gone no further, would
have been similar to the early fusion of Ionic tribes in Attika or of
Iranian tribes in Media. But whereas everywhere else this political
fusion soon stopped, in the Roman world it went on. One after another
Italian tribes and Italian towns were not merely overcome but admitted
to a share in the political rights and privileges of the victors. By the
time this had gone on until the whole Italian peninsula was consolidated
under the headship of Rome, the result was a power incomparably greater
than any other that the world had yet seen. Never before had so many
people been brought under one government without making slaves of most
of them. Liberty had existed before, whether in barbaric tribes or
in Greek cities. Union had existed before, in Assyrian or Persian
despotisms. Now liberty and union were for the first time joined
together, with consequences enduring and stupendous. The whole
Mediterranean world was brought under one government; ancient barriers
of religion, speech, and custom were overthrown in every direction; and
innumerable barbarian tribes, from the Alps to the wilds of northern
Britain, from the Bay of Biscay to the Carpathian mountains, were more
or less completely transformed into Roman citizens, protected by Roman
law, and sharing in the material and spiritual benefits of Roman
civilization. Gradually the whole vast structure became permeated by
Hellenic and Jewish thought, and thus were laid the lasting foundations
of modern society, of a common Christendom, furnished with a common
stock of ideas concerning man's relation to God and the world, and
acknowledging a common standard of right and wrong. This was a
prodigious work, which raised human life to a much higher plane than
that which it had formerly occupied, and endless gratitude is due to the
thousands of steadfast men who in one way or another devoted their lives
to its accomplishment. [Sidenote: The Roman method of nation-making]

This Roman method of nation-making had nevertheless its fatal
shortcomings, and it was only very slowly, moreover, that it wrought
out its own best results. It was but gradually that the rights and
privileges of Roman citizenship were extended over the whole Roman
world, and in the mean time there were numerous instances where
conquered provinces seemed destined to no better fate than had awaited
the victims of Egyptian or Assyrian conquest. The rapacity and cruelty
of Caius Verres could hardly have been outdone by the worst of Persian
satraps; but there was a difference. A moral sense and political sense
had been awakened which could see both the wickedness and the folly of
such conduct. The voice of a Cicero sounded with trumpet tones against
the oppressor, who was brought to trial and exiled for deeds which under
the Oriental system, from the days of Artaxerxes to those of the Grand
Turk, would scarcely have called forth a reproving word. It was by slow
degrees that the Roman came to understand the virtues of his own method,
and learned to apply it consistently until the people of all parts of
the empire were, in theory at least, equal before the law. In theory, I
say, for in point of fact there was enough of viciousness in the Roman
system to prevent it from achieving permanent success. Historians have
been fond of showing how the vitality of the whole system was impaired
by wholesale slave-labour, by the false political economy which taxes
all for the benefit of a few, by the debauching view of civil office
which regards it as private perquisite and not as public trust,
and--worst of all, perhaps--by the communistic practice of feeding an
idle proletariat out of the imperial treasury. The names of these deadly
social evils are not unfamiliar to American ears. Even of the last we
have heard ominous whispers in the shape of bills to promote mendicancy
under the specious guise of fostering education or rewarding military
services. And is it not a striking illustration of the slowness with
which mankind learns the plainest rudiments of wisdom and of justice,
that only in the full light of the nineteenth century, and at the cost
of a terrible war, should the most intelligent people on earth have got
rid of a system of labour devised in the crudest ages of antiquity and
fraught with misery to the employed, degradation to the employers, and
loss to everybody? [Sidenote: Its slow development]

These evils, we see, in one shape or another, have existed almost
everywhere; and the vice of the Roman system did not consist in the fact
that under it they were fully developed, but in the fact that it had no
adequate means of overcoming them. Unless helped by something supplied
from outside the Roman world, civilization must have succumbed to these
evils, the progress of mankind must have been stopped. What was needed
was the introduction of a fierce spirit of personal liberty and local
self-government. The essential vice of the Roman system was that it had
been unable to avoid weakening the spirit of personal independence and
crushing out local self-government among the peoples to whom it had been
applied. It owed its wonderful success to joining Liberty with Union,
but as it went on it found itself compelled gradually to sacrifice
Liberty to Union, strengthening the hands of the central government and
enlarging its functions more and more, until by and by the political
life of the several parts had so far died away that, under the pressure
of attack from without, the Union fell to pieces and the whole political
system had to be slowly and painfully reconstructed.

Now if we ask why the Roman government found itself thus obliged to
sacrifice personal liberty and local independence to the paramount
necessity of holding the empire together, the answer will point us to
the essential and fundamental vice of the Roman method of nation-making.
It lacked the principle of representation. The old Roman world knew
nothing of representative assemblies. [Sidenote: It knew nothing of
representation]

Its senates were assemblies of notables, constituting in the main an
aristocracy of men who had held high office; its popular assemblies were
primary assemblies,--town-meetings. There was no notion of such a thing
as political power delegated by the people to representatives who were
to wield it away from home and out of sight of their constituents. The
Roman's only notion of delegated power was that of authority delegated
by the government to its generals and prefects who discharged at a
distance its military and civil functions. When, therefore, the Roman
popular government, originally adapted to a single city, had come
to extend itself over a large part of the world, it lacked the one
institution by means of which government could be carried on over
so vast an area without degenerating into despotism. [Sidenote: And
therefore ended in despotism]

Even could the device of representation have occurred to the mind of
some statesman trained in Roman methods, it would probably have made no
difference. Nobody would have known how to use it. You cannot invent
an institution as you would invent a plough. Such a notion as that of
representative government must needs start from small beginnings and
grow in men's minds until it should become part and parcel of their
mental habits. For the want of it the home government at Rome became
more and more unmanageable until it fell into the hands of the army,
while at the same time the administration of the empire became more and
more centralized; the people of its various provinces, even while their
social condition was in some respects improved, had less and less
voice in the management of their local affairs, and thus the spirit of
personal independence was gradually weakened. This centralization was
greatly intensified by the perpetual danger of invasion on the northern
and eastern frontiers, all the way from the Rhine to the Euphrates.
Do what it would, the government must become more and more a military
despotism, must revert toward the Oriental type. The period extending
from the third century before Christ to the third century after was a
period of extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but
when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor
Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had
been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream
of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long since
stagnated in Asia.

Two mighty agents, cooperating in their opposite ways to prevent any
such disaster, were already entering upon the scene. The first was the
colonization of the empire by Germanic tribes already far advanced
beyond savagery, already somewhat tinctured with Roman civilization, yet
at the same time endowed with an intense spirit of personal and local
independence. With this wholesome spirit they were about to refresh and
revivify the empire, but at the risk of undoing its work of political
organization and reducing it to barbarism. The second was the
establishment of the Roman church, an institution capable of holding
European society together in spite of a political disintegration that
was widespread and long-continued. While wave after wave of Germanic
colonization poured over romanized Europe, breaking down old
boundary-lines and working sudden and astonishing changes on the map,
setting up in every quarter baronies, dukedoms, and kingdoms fermenting
with vigorous political life; while for twenty generations this salutary
but wild and dangerous work was going on, there was never a moment when
the imperial sway of Rome was quite set aside and forgotten, there was
never a time when union of some sort was not maintained through the
dominion which the church had established over the European mind. When
we duly consider this great fact in its relations to what went before
and what came after, it is hard to find words fit to express the debt of
gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic church.
When we think of all the work, big with promise of the future, that went
on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once
to set apart and stigmatize as the "Dark Ages"; when we consider how the
seeds of what is noblest in modern life were then painfully sown upon
the soil which imperial Rome had prepared; when we think of the various
work of a Gregory, a Benedict, a Boniface, an Alfred, a Charlemagne; we
feel that there is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements
of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with these. Until quite
lately, indeed, the student of history has had his attention too
narrowly confined to the ages that have been preeminent for literature
and art--the so-called classical ages--and thus his sense of historical
perspective has been impaired. When Mr. Freeman uses Gregory of Tours as
a text-book, he shows that he realizes how an epoch may be none the less
portentous though it has not had a Tacitus to describe it, and certainly
no part of history is more full of human interest than the troubled
period in which the powerful streams of Teutonic life pouring into Roman
Europe were curbed in their destructiveness and guided to noble ends by
the Catholic church. Out of the interaction between these two mighty
agents has come the political system of the modern world. The moment
when this interaction might have seemed on the point of reaching a
complete and harmonious result was the glorious thirteenth century, the
culminating moment of the Holy Roman Empire. Then, as in the times of
Caesar or Trajan, there might have seemed to be a union among civilized
men, in which the separate life of individuals and localities was not
submerged. In that golden age alike of feudal system, of empire, and of
church, there were to be seen the greatest monarchs, in fullest sympathy
with their peoples, that Christendom has known,--an Edward I., a St.
Louis, a Frederick II. Then when in the pontificates of Innocent III.
and his successors the Roman church reached its apogee, the religious
yearnings of men sought expression in the sublimest architecture the
world has seen. Then Aquinas summed up in his profound speculations the
substance of Catholic theology, and while the morning twilight of modern
science might be discerned in the treatises of Roger Bacon, while
wandering minstrelsy revealed the treasures of modern speech, soon to
be wrought under the hands of Dante and Chaucer into forms of exquisite
beauty, the sacred fervour of the apostolic ages found itself renewed in
the tender and mystic piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was a wonderful
time, but after all less memorable as the culmination of mediaeval
empire and mediaeval church than as the dawning of the new era in which
we live to-day, and in which the development of human society proceeds
in accordance with more potent methods than those devised by the genius
of pagan or Christian Rome. [Sidenote: The German invaders and the Roman
church] [Sidenote: The wonderful thirteenth century]

For the origin of these more potent methods we must look back to the
early ages of the Teutonic people; for their development and application
on a grand scale we must look chiefly to the history of that most
Teutonic of peoples in its institutions, though perhaps not more than
half-Teutonic in blood, the English, with their descendants in the New
World. The third method of nation-making may be called the Teutonic or
preeminently the English method. It differs from the Oriental and Roman
methods which we have been considering in a feature of most profound
significance; it contains the principle of representation. For this
reason, though like all nation-making it was in its early stages
attended with war and conquest, it nevertheless does not necessarily
require war and conquest in order to be put into operation. Of the other
two methods war was an essential part. In the typical Oriental nation,
such as Assyria or Persia, we see a conquering tribe holding down a
number of vanquished peoples, and treating them like slaves: here the
nation is very imperfectly made, and its government is subject to sudden
and violent changes. In the Roman empire we see a conquering people hold
sway over a number of vanquished peoples, but instead of treating them
like slaves, it gradually makes them its equals before the law; here
the resulting political body is much more nearly a nation, and its
government is much more stable. A Lydian of the fifth century before
Christ felt no sense of allegiance to the Persian master who simply
robbed and abused him; but the Gaul of the fifth century after Christ
was proud of the name of Roman and ready to fight for the empire of
which he was a citizen. We have seen, nevertheless, that for want of
representation the Roman method failed when applied to an immense
territory, and the government tended to become more and more despotic,
to revert toward the Oriental type. Now of the English or Teutonic
method, I say, war is not an essential part; for where representative
government is once established, it is possible for a great nation to be
formed by the peaceful coalescence of neighbouring states, or by their
union into a federal body. An instance of the former was the coalescence
of England and Scotland effected early in the eighteenth century
after ages of mutual hostility; for instances of the latter we have
Switzerland and the United States. Now federalism, though its rise
and establishment may be incidentally accompanied by warfare, is
nevertheless in spirit pacific. Conquest in the Oriental sense is quite
incompatible with it; conquest in the Roman sense is hardly less so. At
the close of our Civil War there were now and then zealous people to
be found who thought that the southern states ought to be treated as
conquered territory, governed by prefects sent from Washington, and held
down by military force for a generation or so. Let us hope that there
are few to-day who can fail to see that such a course would have been
fraught with almost as much danger as the secession movement itself.
At least it would have been a hasty confession, quite uncalled for
and quite untrue, that American federalism had thus far proved itself
incompetent,--that we had indeed preserved our national unity, but only
at the frightful cost of sinking to a lower plane of national life.
[Sidenote: The English method of nation-making] [Sidenote: Pacific
tendencies of federalism]

But federalism, with its pacific implications, was not an invention of
the Teutonic mind. The idea was familiar to the city communities of
ancient Greece, which, along with their intense love of self-government,
felt the need of combined action for warding off external attack. In
their Achaian and Aitolian leagues the Greeks made brilliant attempts
toward founding a nation upon some higher principle than that of mere
conquest, and the history of these attempts is exceedingly
interesting and instructive. They failed for lack of the principle
of representation, which was practically unknown to the world until
introduced by the Teutonic colonizers of the Roman empire. Until the
idea of power delegated by the people had become familiar to men's minds
in its practical bearings, it was impossible to create a great nation
without crushing out the political life in some of its parts. Some
centre of power was sure to absorb all the political life, and grow at
the expense of the outlying parts, until the result was a centralized
despotism. Hence it came to be one of the commonplace assumptions of
political writers that republics must be small, that free government
is practicable only in a confined area, and that the only strong and
durable government, capable of maintaining order throughout a vast
territory, is some form of absolute monarchy. [Sidenote: Fallacy of the
notion that republics must be small]

It was quite natural that people should formerly have held this opinion,
and it is indeed not yet quite obsolete, but its fallaciousness will
become more and more apparent as American history is better understood.
Our experience has now so far widened that we can see that despotism
is not the strongest but wellnigh the weakest form of government; that
centralized administrations, like that of the Roman empire, have fallen
to pieces, not because of too much but because of too little freedom;
and that the only perdurable government must be that which succeeds in
achieving national unity on a grand scale, without weakening the sense
of personal and local independence. For in the body politic this spirit
of freedom is as the red corpuscles in the blood; it carries the life
with it. It makes the difference between a society of self-respecting
men and women and a society of puppets.

Your nation may have art, poetry, and science, all the refinements of
civilized life, all the comforts and safeguards that human ingenuity can
devise; but if it lose this spirit of personal and local independence,
it is doomed and deserves its doom. As President Cleveland has well
said, it is not the business of a government to support its people, but
of the people to support their government; and once to lose sight
of this vital truth is as dangerous as to trifle with some stealthy
narcotic poison. Of the two opposite perils which have perpetually
threatened the welfare of political society--anarchy on the one hand,
loss of self-government on the other--Jefferson was right in maintaining
that the latter is really the more to be dreaded because its beginnings
are so terribly insidious. Many will understand what is meant by a
threat of secession, where few take heed of the baneful principle
involved in a Texas Seed-bill.

That the American people are still fairly alive to the importance of
these considerations, is due to the weary ages of struggle in which our
forefathers have manfully contended for the right of self-government.
From the days of Arminius and Civilis in the wilds of lower Germany to
the days of Franklin and Jefferson in Independence Hall, we have been
engaged in this struggle, not without some toughening of our political
fibre, not without some refining of our moral sense. Not among our
English forefathers only, but among all the peoples of mediaeval and
modern Europe has the struggle gone on, with various and instructive
results. In all parts of romanized Europe invaded and colonized by
Teutonic tribes, self-government attempted to spring up. What may have
been the origin of the idea of representation we do not know; like most
origins, it seems lost in the prehistoric darkness. Wherever we find
Teutonic tribes settling down over a wide area, we find them holding
their primary assemblies, usually their annual March-meetings, like
those in which Mr. Hosea Biglow and others like him have figured.
Everywhere, too, we find some attempt at representative assemblies,
based on the principle of the three estates, clergy, nobles, and
commons. But nowhere save in England does the representative principle
become firmly established, at first in county-meetings, afterward in a
national parliament limiting the powers of the national monarch as the
primary tribal assembly had limited the powers of the tribal chief. It
is for this reason that we must call the method of nation-making by
means of a representative assembly the English method. While the idea of
representation was perhaps the common property of the Teutonic tribes,
it was only in England that it was successfully put into practice and
became the dominant political idea. We may therefore agree with Dr.
Stubbs that in its political development England is the most Teutonic of
all European countries,--the country which in becoming a great nation
has most fully preserved the local independence so characteristic of the
ancient Germans. The reasons for this are complicated, and to try to
assign them all would needlessly encumber our exposition. But there is
one that is apparent and extremely instructive. There is sometimes a
great advantage in being able to plant political institutions in a
virgin soil, where they run no risk of being modified or perhaps
metamorphosed through contact with rival institutions. In America the
Teutonic idea has been worked out even more completely than in Britain;
and so far as institutions are concerned, our English forefathers
settled here as in an empty country. They were not obliged to modify
their political ideas so as to bring them into harmony with those of the
Indians; the disparity in civilization was so great that the Indians
were simply thrust aside, along with the wolves and buffaloes.
[Sidenote: Teutonic March-meetings and representative assemblies]

This illustration will help us to understand the peculiar features of
the Teutonic settlement of Britain. Whether the English invaders really
slew all the romanized Kelts who dwelt in the island, except those who
found refuge in the mountains of Cumberland, Wales, and Cornwall, or
fled across the channel to Brittany, we need not seek to decide. It