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CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION.

All through its ranks gleamed the burnished arms of its devoted allies, waved the proud banners which had waved over it in triumph for more than half a thousand years. And in front, as far as eye could reach, stretched the firm phalanx of the enemy; calm, deliberate, resolute, fearless, confident of victory. For it was no longer a war of king against king, a war to decide whether an Austrian or a Frenchman should sit on the throne of Spain, whether a few millions more or less of Italians, or of Flemings, should be thrown, as make-weights, into the scale, when their owners were tired of fighting, and satiated with military glory; but the great war of the ages, which was to crush forever the hopes of civilization, or open wide the gates of progress as they had never been opened before. And therefore it was meet that the signal of battle should come from men who saw distinctly for what they were contending, and were prepared to stake their all upon the issue. As a chapter of English and American history, the American Revolution is but the attempt of one people to prescribe the bounds of the industry of another, and appropriate its profits. As a chapter, and one, too, of the brightest and best in the history of humanity, it is the protest of inalienable rights against hereditary prerogative; the demonstration of a people's power to think justly, decide wisely, and act firmly for themselves.

LECTURE II.

THE PHASES OF THE REVOLUTION.

IN

N my first Lecture I endeavored to show the historical position of the American Revolution, and point out the causes which produced it. We saw, that, as a purely English and American question, it was the necessary consequence of the colonial system, a struggle for monopoly on one side, and free labor on the other. We saw that, as a chapter in the history of European civilization, it was a struggle between hereditary prerogative and inalienable rights. Both of these views will be confirmed by the historical sketch which I propose to give you this evening of the phases through which it passed in the progress of its development.

The first permanent English Colony in America was planted in 1607, and by 1643 the foundations of New England had been so securely laid, that Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed a league for mutual protection against the French and Indians, under the significant title of the United Colonies of New England.

History has nowhere recorded greater perseverance, or a more marvellous growth. On what, as we look at the map, seems a narrow strip of land betwixt the wilderness and the ocean, with a wily enemy ever at their doors, they had built seaports and inland towns, and extended with wonderful celerity their conquests over man and over nature. There were jealousies and dissensions among them. There were frequent misunderstandings with England about undefined rights. The Church, too, from which they had fled that they might worship God in their own way, had already cast longing eyes upon their new abode, as a field ripe for her chosen reapers. But their strong municipal organization controlled jealousies and dissensions, even where it failed to suppress them. However vague English ideas of their rights might be, there were certain points whereon their own were perfectly defined. And when the Church from longing prepared to pass to open invasion, they prepared for open resistance. They had hardly emerged from infancy when they began to wear the aspect and speak the language of vigorous manhood. For they had been planted at happy moments, when James was starting questions which compelled men to think, and Charles doing things which compelled men to act. Those among them which had charters watched them jealously and interpreted them liberally. Those that had not yet obtained them spared no exertions to ob

tain them; falling back, meanwhile, upon their municipal institutions as a resource that met all their present wants. A few more years like the past, and the whole seaboard would be peopled.

As yet, however, one element of strength was wanting, a spirit of union; for the New England Union was rather the expression of an immediate want, than a natural aggregation of sympathetic parts. Plymouth was soon merged in Massachusetts, and New Haven in Connecticut. And both Massachusetts and Connecticut, which had never admitted little Rhode Island to their confederacy, would gladly have divided her between them. New York was still Dutch, and remained Dutch in feelings and habits long after it had become English in name. New Jersey was not yet settled. A few Swedes were trying to build up colonies in what some years later became Pennsylvania and Delaware. Catholics, with an uncongenial code of religious toleration, held Maryland, while Virginia, the oldest and wealthiest Colony of all, had grown up under the shadow of the Church, and with a reverence for the King which seemed to place an insuperable barrier betwixt her and her unbishop-loving and more than half republican sisters of the East. Thus each Colony still stood alone; each still looked to England as to a mother to whom they were all bound by natural and not unwelcome ties.

Yet something which might have awakened sus

picion had already occurred. The Pilgrims had not yet gathered in the first harvest which they wrung with weary hands from the ungrateful soil of Plymouth, when an English Order in Council was issued, forbidding the exportation to foreign countries of any colonial product which had not previously paid duty in England. The only Colony to which this order could as yet apply was Virginia; but what would not a mother be likely to ask of her children in the day of prosperity, who already asked so much in the day of trial?

Twenty-two years passed, and a warning voice came from New England; "where," says the chronicler," the supplies from England failing much, men began to look about them, and fell to a manufacture of cotton." Prophetic glances, these, into a distant future; but, like so much of human foresight, thwarted and made useless by human passion.

It was in no unkind spirit towards New England that Parliament passed the Navigation Act of 1651, but partly to curb the aggressions of Holland, and partly to arouse the slumbering energy of English nautical enterprise. New England might have asked much of the rulers of the Commonwealth which she wisely refrained from asking. There was little that Virginia could have asked which would not have been granted grudgingly, if granted at all. The Commonwealth passed away, and the Restoration found the Colonies stronger in