only by conditions peculiarly American. Neither the Dutch nor the French nor the Spanish left a single enduring law nor a single institution that has survived.1 The immigrant since their time has brought with him his own customs, and he has cast them off as he discarded the garments of the Fatherland when with American money he purchased American clothes. Whence came this extraordinary power of assimilation? We cannot answer that question now; it will answer itself in the succeeding pages as we trace the growth of American nationality. No, the Puritan for the Pilgrim need be only incidentally considered in the course of this investigation-came to Massachusetts an Englishman, a rebel at heart, a protagonist to be given for the first time full scope for the display of his powers, and a man of profound religious conviction who was to set up the theocracy in which he believed and which had been denied him in England. The Massachusetts man was not an American, for America in the early part of the seventeenth century was a geographical expression and not a political entity. A race is not the product of to-day or yesterday; it is the result of all the influences that have made it. In England those influences had been at work for a hundred years before the Puritan set foot on American soil. The Puritan left England with 1 That in Louisiana the code is based upon the Spanish law and the Code Napoléon does not contradict the general assertion. bitterness in his heart not untinged with regret; the voyage across the Atlantic changed him not in the slightest, and he came to his new home full of courage but also full of determination, still ready to rebel against authority that should attempt to throttle his liberty. The American has always been a rebel. He is a living protest. His existence is a protest against usurped authority. To a rebel fighting is second nature. The American has always fought, against nature, against man, against government when that government sought to oppress him. That was the moral attitude of the Puritan. It displayed itself as early as 1635, when Massachusetts contained a mere handful of struggling colonists. The fear that Charles I would seek to exercise arbitrary power led them to prepare to resist the Crown. They fortified Boston Harbor, and the militia was placed on a war footing. The spirit of 1776 did not suddenly flash into life. It was born nearly a century and a half before. A digression for a moment is necessary. In reading history backward the mind overleaps the ages. Certain great events in the life of races or nations stand out so prominently that they cannot be overlooked, but the causes that produced them are often obscure and their significance is hidden. Many writers have found it convenient to ascribe the beginning of Americanism to the Declaration of Independence, as if that had made articulate an invertebrate people. Now that were absurd. The Declaration of Independence was not cause but effect. 'It was only the first unanswerable assertion that this new people had come into existence.” 1 The defiance of England by Jefferson and Hancock and Franklin and the other men who appended their signatures to the great charter gained no strength from their written declaration. This defiance had for years been slowly growing. It followed, it did not precede, the liberty that Patrick Henry so passionately invoked. Long before the parchment was made on which the Declaration of Independence was written, long years before that shot was fired which echoed in the heart of freedom, long before the guns of Lexington and Concord spoke, men had heard the voice that called them to resist. Lexington and Concord were the outward and visible signs of the spiritual teachings that began in England two hundred and fifty years earlier, that buried their roots deep in the soil of New England, and were fed by the immanent conviction in the divine inspiration, and a profound belief that there was only one law-the law of God—and that as God had taught His people to resist oppression, so it was the duty of those who would walk in the light of His countenance to hearken to the voice of Sinai. The beginning of America we may really date to 1604. In that year met the first Parliament of James I, in which the Puritans had a majority; 1 Wendell: Liberty, Union, and Democracy, p. 81. and one of the first acts of the House of Commons was to enact measures to redress certain ecclesiastical grievances, which the Lords, backed by James, rejected. This put the Commons on their mettle, and they boldly told the king that he had no more power to change religion than he had to alter any laws without the consent of Parliament. James, with all the obstinacy and short-sightedness of the Stuarts, would listen to no advice; reformers were declared guilty of sedition and rebellion and punished; the Church enunciated anew the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the duty of obedience to those placed in authority. And observe again how the great wheel of life forever revolves and the seeming impossibility of men to profit by the experience of the past. The contest between James I and his people ought to have been a warning to Charles I, but it went unheeded, and Charles lost his head, just as George III, for the same reason, lost his American colonies. Had the grievances of which the Puritans complained been redressed by James, there would, in all probability, have been no civil war, no flight to Holland and thence to America, no tragedy at Whitehall; America would have been settled by Englishmen, but they would, one is inclined to believe, have remained Englishmen. It was the stupidity and vanity of an obstinate and narrow man that created a race. The purpose of the Puritan in leaving England and coming to Massachusetts was to create a theocratic state which, as Fiske says, should be, under the New Testament dispensation, all that the theocracy of Moses and Joshua and Samuel had been to the Jews in Old Testament days. "It was one great design of the first planters of the Massachusetts colony to obtain for themselves and their posterity the liberty of worshiping God in such manner as appeared to them to be most agreeable to the sacred scriptures." They came with that distinct purpose, and it was one of the causes that made them rebel at heart from the beginning. They were prepared to render allegiance to their Heavenly King, but they were in no mood tamely to submit to the tyranny of Stuart monarchs. They had no use for man-made constitutions, or for experiments in government; to those speculations that later were so dear to the French philosophers they gave no countenance. Their way lay straight before them. The small book that has influenced the thought of mankind more than all the ponderous tomes of philosopher and reformer was their sole guide. If they were in doubt, they had only to look into the Bible and find all doubts removed. If there was any question beyond the finite capacity of man to solve, they had only to search and find the answer in the Word. They were not tolerant men, they were not 1 Fiske: The Beginnings of New England, p. 146. |