that the colonization of America was going on most rapidly, some of the best citizens of England, if it be any part of good citizenship to resist oppression, were immured in her prisons of State or lying at the mercy of the law.

Such were some of the convicts by whom America was settled-men convicted of fearing God more than they feared man; of sacrificing property, ease, and all the comforts of life, to a sense of duty and to the dictates of conscience; men convicted of pure lives, brave hearts, and simple manners. The enterprise was led by Raleigh, the chivalrous convict, who unfortunately believed that his royal master had the heart of a man, and would not let a sentence of death, which had slumbered for sixteen years, revive and take effect after so long an interval of employment and favor. But nullum tempus occurrit regi. The felons who followed next were the heroic and long-suffering Church of Robinson, at Leyden-Carver, Brewster, Bradford, Winslow, and their pious associates, convicted of worshipping God according to the dictates of their consciences, and of giving up all-country, property, and the tombs of their fathers that they might do it unmolested. Not content with having driven the Puritans from her soil, England next enacted or put in force the oppressive laws which colonized Maryland with Catholics and Pennsylvania with Quakers. Nor was it long before the American plantations were recruited by the Germans, convicted of inhabiting the Palatinate, when the merciless armies of Louis XIV. were turned into that devoted region, and by the Huguenots, convicted of holding what they deemed the simple truth of Christianity, when it pleased the mistress of Louis XIV. to be very zealous for the Catholic faith. These were followed, in the next century, by the Highlanders, convicted

of the enormous crime, under a monarchical government, of loyalty to their hereditary prince on the plains of Culloden, and the Irish, convicted of supporting the rights of their country against what they deemed an oppressive external power. Such are the convicts by whom America was settled.

In this way, a fair representation of whatsoever was most valuable in European character-the resolute industry of one nation, the inventive skill and curious arts of another, the courage, conscience, principle, self-denial of all -was winnowed out, by the policy of the prevailing governments, as a precious seed wherewith to plant the American soil. By this singular coincidence of events, our country was constituted the great asylum of suffering virtue and oppressed humanity. It could now no longer be said-as it was of the Roman Empire-that mankind was shut up, as if in a vast prison house, from whence there was no escape. The political and ecclesiastical oppressors of the world allowed their persecution to find a limit at the shores of the Atlantic. They scarcely ever attempted to pursue their victims beyond its protecting waters. It is plain that in this way alone the design of Providence could be accomplished, which provided for one catholic school of freedom in the Western Hemisphere. For it must not be a freedom of too sectional and peculiar a cast. On the stock of the English civilization, as the general basis, were to be ingrafted the language, the arts, and the tastes of the other civilized nations. A tie of consanguinity must connect the members of every family of Europe with some portion of our happy land; so that in all their trials and disasters they may look safely beyond the ocean for a refuge. The victims of power, of intolerance, of war, of disaster, in every

other part of the world, must feel that they may find a kin dred home within our limits. Kings, whom the perilous convulsions of the day have shaken from their thrones, must find a safe retreat; and the needy emigrant must at least not fail of his bread and water, were it only for the sake of the great discoverer, who was himself obliged to beg them. On this cornerstone the temple of our freedom was laid from the first

"For here the exile met from every clime,

And spoke in friendship every distant tongue;
Men, from the blood of warring Europe sprung,
Were here divided by the running brook.

This peculiarity of our population, which some have thought a misfortune, is in reality one of the happiest circumstances attending the settlement of the country. It assures the exile from every part of Europe a kind reception from men of his own tongue and race. Had we been the unmixed descendants of any one nation of Europe, we should have retained a moral and intellectual dependence on that nation, even after the dissolution of our political connection had taken place. It was sufficient for the great purpose in view, that the earliest settlements were made by men who had fought the battles of liberty in England, and who brought with them the rudiments of constitutional freedom to a region where no deep-rooted prescriptions would prevent their development. Instead of marring the symme try of our social system, it is one of its most attractive and beautiful peculiarities, that, with the prominent qualities of the Anglo-Saxon character inherited from our English fathers, we have an admixture of almost everything that is valuable in the character of most of the other States of Europe.

Such was the first preparation for the great political reform, of which America was to be the theatre. The Colonies of England-of a country where the supremacy of laws and the Constitution is best recognized-the North American Colonies-were protected from the first against the introduction of the unmitigated despotism which prevailed in the Spanish settlements-the continuance of which, down to the moment of their late revolt, prevented the education of these provinces in the exercise of political rights, and in that way has thrown them into the revolution inexperienced and unprepared-victims, some of them, to a domestic anarchy scarcely less grievous than the foreign yoke they have thrown off. While, however, the settlers of America brought with them the principles and feelings, the political habits and temper, which defied the encroachment of arbitrary power, and made it necessary, when they were to be oppressed, that they should be oppressed under the forms of law, it was an unavoidable consequence of the state of things-a result, perhaps, of the very nature of a Colonial government—that they should be thrown into a position of controversy with the mother country, and thus become familiar with the whole energetic doctrine and discipline of resistance. This formed and hardened the temper of the Colonists, and trained them up to a spirit meet for the struggles of separation.

On the other hand, by what I had almost called an accidental circumstance, but one which ought rather to be considered as a leading incident in the great train of events connected with the establishment of constitutional freedom in this country, it came to pass that nearly all the Colonies (founded as they were on the charters granted to corporate institutions in England, which had for their object the pur

suit of the branches of industry and trade pertinent to a new plantation) adopted a regular representative system, by which, as in ordinary civil corporations, the affairs of the community are decided by the will and the voices of its members, or those authorized by them. It was no device of the parent government which gave us our colonial assemblies. It was no refinement of philosophical statesmen to which we are indebted for our republican institutions of government. They grew up, as it were, by accident, on the simple foundation I have named. "A House of Burgesses, says Hutchinson, "broke out in Virginia, in 1620;" and, "although there was no color for it in the charter of Massachusetts, a House of Deputies appeared suddenly in 1634." "Lord Say," observes the same historian, "tempted the principal men of Massachusetts to make themselves and their heirs nobles and absolute governors of a new colony, but under this plan they could find no people to follow them."

At this early period, and in this simple, unpretending manner, was introduced to the world that greatest discovery in political science, or political practice, a representative republican system. "The discovery of the system of the representative republic," says M. de Chateaubriand, "is one of the greatest political events that ever occurred." But it is not one of the greatest, it is the very greatest, and, combined with another principle, to which I shall presently advert, and which is also the invention of the United States, it marks an era in human affairs-a discovery in the great science of social life, compared with which everything else that terminates in the temporal interests of man sinks into insignificance.

Thus, then, was the foundation laid, and thus was the