watchfulness of the mother country kept pace with their increasing prosperity. As new branches of industry were opened, new shackles were forged, and every fresh product of their enterprise was promptly added to the lists of prohibition. The Navigation Act, in its enlarged form, was passed in 1660; in 1763 it had woven its toils around American enterprise in twenty-nine separate acts, each breathing its spirit and enforcing its claims.

It is not difficult to imagine the feelings with which these acts were received. Open resistance, indeed, was impossible, and remonstrance would have been unavailing. Still the obedience that was rendered wore oftener the air of remonstrance than of cheerful acquiescence; and although the right was generally conceded, the exercise of it excited bickerings and heart-burnings that gradually prepared the way for independence. The enterprising spirit itself could not be repressed; and smuggling, its natural outlet, became almost as reputable, and far more profitable, than regular trade.

Thus the relation of England to her Colonies, which might have been a relation of mutual good offices, became, on her part, a mere business relation, founded upon the principle of capital and labor, and conducted with a single eye to her own interests. They formed for her a market of consumption and supply, consuming large quantities of her manufactures, and supplying her, at the

lowest rates, with many objects that she required for her own consumption. What they sent out as raw material, she returned prepared for use. Her ship-owners grew rich as they carried the sure freight to and fro. Her manufactures gave free play to their spirit of enterprise, for their market was secured to them by a rigorous monopoly. She had the exclusive right of buying, and therefore bought upon her own terms; the exclusive right of selling, and therefore set her own prices. If with all these restrictions and obstacles the Colonies still continued to grow in wealth and strength, it was because in a new country, where land was cheap, the spirit of industry could not be crushed from a distance of three thousand miles by the spirit of monopoly.

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Still the feeling engendered by this relation was not of a kind to make it lasting. That of the Americans was distrust and suspicion, strangely mixed up with filial reverence, an instinctive sense of injury, instantly met by the instinctive suggestion, that there must be some constitutional reason for doing it, or it would not be done. That of England was summed up with somewhat more of concision than of elegance in Attorney-General Seymor's reply to Commissioner Blair. Pleading warmly for a moderate enlargement of the moderate allowance to the churches of Virginia, "Consider, sir," said the pious commissioner, "that the people of Virginia have souls to save."

"Damn

A second cause, equally active, and in its effects equally powerful with the first, was English ignorance of America. Nothing alienates man from man more surely than the want of mutual appreciation. Sympathy founded upon respect for our feelings, and a just estimate of our worth, is one of the earliest cravings of the human heart. It begins with our first recognition of existence, imparting an irresistible eloquence to the eye and to the lips of infancy. It grows with our youth, and, as we rise into manhood, finds new strength in reason and experience, teaching us in their daily lessons that without it there can be no sure foundation for the purest and noblest sentiments of our nature. It is the only feeling which can reconcile us to that condition of mutual dependence in which it has pleased our Maker to place us in this life; and working, as all the feelings which he has implanted in our breasts work, for the accomplishment of its appropriate end, it cherishes in the harmonious co-operation of fellowcitizens the germ of that beneficent concurrence of human wills and human desires, which, in God's chosen time, will become the brotherhood of the nations.

Few Englishmen had accurate ideas of the nature, the extent, or even the position of the Colonies. And when the Duke of Newcastle hurried

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