necessarily excluded from it. In that sense of the term there is no aristocracy in England, and never has been. Macaulay points out the peculiar "relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty. There was a strong aristocracy; but it was of all hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a peer, the younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of peers yielded precedence to newly made knights." The dignity of knighthood, he tells us, was not beyond the reach of any man who was worthy of it; it was no disgrace for the daughter of a duke, a royal duke even, to espouse a commoner; "pedigrees as long, and scutcheons as old, were to be found out of the House of Lords as in it." The constitution of the House of Commons promoted the intermixture of classes. Side by side with the goldsmiths, the drapers and the grocers who represented the commercial towns, were men who in any other country would have been called noblemen. The heirs of great peers who sat in the House of Commons as representatives of the people, and not because of their prospective enjoyment of a title, "naturally became as zealous for its privileges as any of the humble burgesses with whom they were mingled. Thus our democracy was, from an early period,

the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world; a peculiarity which has lasted down to the present day, and which has produced many important moral and political effects."

It has been a subject of much speculation what peculiar influence made it possible for the men of the South to join the men of the North in resisting common oppression, inasmuch as they were drawn from different classes and their outlook of life was so unlike. But there is no mystery about it. They were men of the same stock, with the same ideas and the same ideals. They reached the same ends through different ways. Religious persecution made the Puritan no more resolute for liberty than political persecution made the Cavalier. Both had been defiant in England: the one had proved it by refusing submission to things spiritual, the other had risen in opposition to the temporal power, and they brought the same spirit of defiance with them across the sea. When Charles I threatened to chastise the rebellious colony of Massachusetts, those born rebels, with no thought of surrender, threw up a fort and mounted their pop-guns to defy the might of England. When Cromwell sent an expedition to make Virginia understand that he was master, those haughty Virginians drew up a treaty of peace that reads more like the terms dictated by a sovereign nation than a weak colony. They were always the same, those quiet Puritans and those

1 Macaulay: History of England, vol. i, pp. 19–20.

laughter-loving Virginians; it is only the historian who has made them different.

66

To us it is of less importance whether Virginia was founded by Cavalier or Roundhead, it is the consequences that compel our study. It was the accident of the tobacco plant and climate that made it possible for an aristocracy to thrive in Virginia, and an aristocracy it was in every sense of the word. It absorbed into its order all political and social power. It was an oligarchy as well as an aristocracy. It held with firm grip military as well as civil authority. To it the Church was subservient. It did not receive members from the people, nor was it 'constantly sending down members to mingle with the people." Its power, its arrogance and its pride made it a more haughty and exclusive aristocracy than any then existing in Europe. And all this interesting enough though it is to the student of social institutions would be of little moment if we were not able to trace back to this aristocracy certain American characteristics and institutions that have become part of the American race and American civilization. The American is a blend of the Puritan and the Cavalier, to accept an inexact terminology so rich in contrast; a mixture of Massachusetts and Virginia; a product of the corn that ripened slowly under northern skies and the tobacco that sprung into life in the soil of the south. The influence of Massachusetts is there, but so also is that of Virginia; and great as the influence

of Massachusetts, that of Virginia is no less. It was tobacco that made Virginia so different from Massachusetts; it was Virginia that made the American so different from what he would have been had another Massachusetts taken root in the South.

When the Cavaliers came to Virginia they found a thriving community in the enjoyment of a profitable monopoly. Many of the newcomers had been badly crippled in estate by devotion to a cause that was fated to be lost — curious the eternal weaving of the same pattern in the great fabric of history; two hundred years later the descendants of these same Cavaliers championed a cause, and again they lost and suffered-but many of them were still sufficiently endowed to be able to resume life under circumstances very similar to those they had known in England. For them there was only one thing to do, and that was to plant tobacco and enjoy its profits. They acquired large grants of land, they worked their plantations with white servants and slaves; the great house reproduced as nearly as possible the castle or the manor house of England; its master looked after his lands and servants and slaves as in the old days he had directed the harvesting of his crops and taken a paternal interest in the welfare of his tenantry. In England property passed from father to the first-born son and was entailed. Being Englishmen and having property to devise, they established the custom of primogeniture and the law of entail.

There was no such law in Massachusetts, and the accident of birth counted for little in favor of one son over another. In grafting an "aristocratic" custom on the new civilization of Virginia proof has been found of the aristocracy of Virginia contrasted with the democracy of Massachusetts, which is further strengthened by the difference between the political system of the two colonies. But economic rather than social causes developed those distinctions. Tobacco could not be profitably cultivated except on a large scale, and to divide up an estate among many children would be to benefit none and impoverish all. The English law and custom, despite its manifest injustice and often injurious results, worked reasonably well, and the Englishmen saw no reason to make a change. In Massachusetts conditions were different. There were no large estates to be protected from loss by division; wealth was commercial rather than landed. A system that seemed to be peculiarly adapted to the needs of Virginia would have been out of place in Massachusetts.

Considerations equally cogent resulted in local institutions dissimilar in the two colonies. In Massachusetts the people lived in small congregations or communities clustered around the meetinghouse, each intended to be a petty, self-governing republic and reproducing in a way the Roman city state; whose people could rally for support and mutual defense; where the sense of fellowship was