by the king, naturally believed in the divine right of kings and preached obedience and submission to the spiritual and temporal head of the Church. The Reformation had wrought many changes in the outward observance of religion and religious forms, but it had left untouched the great system of caste in the Church. No stronger incentive than that was needed to make men imbued with the tenets of Calvinism unconsciously drift toward democracy. Calvinism was in essence democracy. In the Parliamentary party there were men who were in religion Independents, who were, "to use the kindred phrase of our own time, radicals," as Macaulay says.1 “Great as were the faults of Puritanism, it may fairly claim to be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the people as a whole." Green dwells on "the new conception of social equality” that was the product of Puritanism and shows how it led to democracy. "Their common call, their common brotherhood in Christ, annihilated in the minds of the Puritans that overpowering sense of social distinction which characterized the age of Elizabeth. The meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as a child of God. The proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality in the poorest 'saint.""' Thus "" Thus it will be seen that democracy did not spring from the virgin soil of 1 Macaulay: History of England, vol. i, p. 58. 2 Green: History of the English People, vol. vii, p. 150. Massachusetts; the seed had been sown on English' ground, and it brought forth its harvest long before that great hegira which gave a new impulse to individualism. The growth of Protestantism, of Calvinism especially, made the masses appreciate their power. "For the first time in British history, the common people had become a power in the land. They cared nothing for their leaders and little for their king. They worshiped a heavenly monarch, so far above all earthly rulers that to them terrestrial potentates seemed puppets. Narrow-minded these men were, of course, ignorant, and like their preachers, superstitious, rude in manner, often brutal in action." But they were no more sensible of their power at first than the growing, healthy child knows his strength, the full realization of which comes to him only when in a moment of resistance against the authorities of the home he rebels and finds he has that within him that makes him feared. Under the influence of religion the people of England had been slowly acquiring moral strength, courage, purpose, the importance of which the world was first to see on a new continent where there was space to build new political institutions, where the ground was unencumbered with the débris of institutions become obsolete, and where the foundations could be laid so deep that neither the storm of passion nor the folly of man could destroy them. 1 Campbell: op. cit., vol. ii, p. 12. 1 CHAPTER X THE AMERICAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN A REBEL In previous chapters I have shown how the character of the English people had been slowly changing, developing, and broadening from the time of the Reformation until the Commonwealth. The transition was logical. Serfdom had given way to freedom, the power of the barons had been curtailed until at last the feudal system was broken down; as the power of the nobles declined that of the people rose, and with every fresh extension of their liberties they demanded still more. Long had they lain under the thrall of the Church, and long had they felt an insistent desire to escape from it and to come into their spiritual and moral freedom, which at last they won because they had the courage to fight for it. In an age that has long ceased to believe in miracles one miracle has still survived, and with an industry worthy to be devoted to better things teachers have endeavored to impress on their students a belief in the miraculous. A very simple explanation has been offered for the genesis of American institutions, those institutions that Campbell, in his intense desire to trace back to Rome and to Holland, to Scotland and to Spain, to anywhere, in fact, except to England, so curiously terms "un-English." In some mysterious way those seers of New England drew their inspiration from the air, and like Jonah's gourd their civilization sprang up overnight. Never has the world witnessed a miracle more wonderful than this. The carpenters and the coopers, the fustian-workers and the hatters, the smiths and the wool-carders,' these plain and simple folk who were the passengers on the Mayflower, who in England were content to pursue their humble callings and had given no evidence that they were superior in intellect to their fellow workers, in their passage across the ocean had been transformed and become endowed with the gift of genius. If so, the voyage of Jason and his fellow Argonauts was no more marvelous than this. But alluring as it would be to the imagination to think that at the moment when the sails of the Mayflower were furled the law of causation ceased and like the magnetic needle at the North Pole no longer pointed to the true north, there is neither justification nor reason for dismissing the truth to seek an explanation in the fantastic. The causes are quite simple and perfectly rational. They are to be found close at hand if the trouble is taken 1 Ames: The May-Flower and her Log, p. 194. Ames gives this list of the vocations of adults so far as known (except wives, who are presumed housekeepers for their husbands): Carpenters, 2; Cooper, 1; Fustian-worker and silk-dyer, 1; Hatter, 1; Lay Reader, 1; Lady's-maid, 1; Merchant, 1; Physician, 1; Printers and publishers, 2; Seamen, 4; Servants (adults), 10; Smith, 1; Soldier, 1; Tailor, 1; Tradesmen, 2; Wool-carder, 1. to search for them. Nor do we have to go back to Rome, which has been the fad of some writers, to find there the inspiration for American institutions, except as Rome colored English civilization. And it is equally absurd to think that the short time spent by the Separatists in Holland so altered their whole concept of life that they cast off the influences of English descent and training and traditions and became Dutch in spirit and in everything else except in language. That were a miracle second only to the first and greater phenomenon. "The whole world was their quarry, and all the past their architects." Most accounts of the origin of American institutions have been so colored by the prejudices of their writers that although they conscientiously endeavored to write history they succeeded in producing hagiology, which may be entertaining reading, but is never accurate. It is worth noting here that although the Dutch planted New York, and the Swedes Delaware, and the Spanish Florida, and the French Louisiana; "the Dutch, the French, and the English made a simultaneous sowing of the great struggle for commercial and political supremacy in North America"; and since that day the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Jews, the Scandinavians have flowed in neverending stream to swell the flood of the American race, they have all been absorbed into and have not absorbed the English. The law, the speech, the institutions of America are English, and modified |