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ized how well they were able to take care of themselves, they quickly resented the efforts of the home government to treat them politically as children and constantly to remind them of their dependence. They were feeling their own strength and were conscious of what they had done.

Everything tended to stimulate resistance. The mental attitude of the Englishman of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in one respect at least, was not unlike that of the Englishman of the nineteenth century in his insular contempt for foreigners and the tactlessness he displayed in dealing with his children who had become colonists. He seems to have forgotten that the men who were building a new empire across the Atlantic were men of his own blood, often men of his own family; and "colonist" was almost a term of reproach, if not of disdain. It was characteristic of this attitude that when Dr. Blair went to England to try to obtain money to establish a college in Virginia and approached Sir Edward Seymour for a grant from the treasury, he met with a curt refusal. "You must not forget," Blair mildly told him, "that people in Virginia have souls to save as well as people in England." "Souls," Seymour echoed in derision, “damn your souls! Grow tobacco!" And the character of the governors that administered the colony was a direct invitation to defy authority. Many of them were men of ability who had the interests of the colony at heart, but more of them were men of little capa

city, court favorites who were pitchforked into office as an easy means of finding them a profitable job, and to whom Virginia meant nothing except a place of exile and the means of replenishing a depleted purse. A little more tact in dealing with a proud and self-reliant people, a little more sympathy with their aims and aspirations, a little better understanding of their character, and the friction of the first hundred and fifty years would have been avoided and the great drama of 1776 need not have been staged. They were a people easily led but difficult to drive. And few Englishmen, from Argall to George III, ever understood that simple truth.

In Virginia as in Massachusetts, from the time when the colonists first obtained a measure of selfgovernment until they threw off their allegiance to the mother country, there was constant agitation to check the encroachment of the governors, which sometimes existed only in the imagination of the colonists; and to increase the measure of popular liberty, or to oppose legislation that was enacted solely in the interest of British merchants and destroyed or hampered colonial commerce and enterprise. Usually this discontent voiced itself in discussion and protest, to which we may trace the extraordinary power of political oratory which distinguishes the American, and it was an excellent school of political training; but from time to time there was open and armed resistance to royal

authority, which should have been a warning to men less blinded by their own conceit. Every American schoolboy is familiar with Nathaniel Bacon's attempt to overthrow Sir William Berkeley's rule and his indictment of that stout old Cavalier, which foreshadowed by a hundred years the indictment of George III, there being in both instruments a curious similarity of language and thought, which proves conclusively, I think, that long before the American nation was born the seed had been sown in the spirit of resistance and opposition and a determination to submit to no form of government that did not first consider the rights and welfare of the people.' But Virginia was not alone in having to put down rebellion in the early history of the colonies. In Maryland, in Massachusetts, in New York, there was resistance to authority;

1 Bacon's Indictment of Sir William Berkeley, the original of which is in the British State Paper Office, contains many counts, of which the following are the most important and characteristic:

"For having upon specious pretence of public works raised unjust taxes upon the commonalty for the advancement of private favourites and other sinister ends, but no visible effects in any measure adequate.

"For not having, during the long time of his government, in any measure advanced this hopeful colony either by fortifications, towns, or trade.

"For having abused and rendered contemptible the majesty of justice, of advancing to places of judicature scandalous and ignorant favourites.

"For having wronged his Majesty's prerogative and interest by assuming the monopoly of the beaver trade.

"For having in that unjust gain bartered and sold his Majesty's country and the lives of his loyal subjects to the barbarous heathen.

"For having protected, favoured, and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty's most loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for their many invasions, murders, and robberies committed upon us."

there was always the latent spirit of rebellion swift to flame into open defiance.

A strong race, similar to a man of strong character, is never content, but always finds present conditions capable of improvement and endeavors to better them. A race that is satisfied is like the man whose ambition is gratified, and then quickly follow stagnation and decay. It is this wholesome discontent, this unrest, this longing for something finer, this ever striving for excellence, this criticism, that make the man stronger and better and the race more resolute and capable of accomplishing great things. That these Englishmen were to found a great and vigorous race was indicated by their never being quite satisfied, even when life ran easily and smoothly for them, and they never sank into that destructive state of smug complacency which is the beginning of the end of all progress; the corollary of a fatuous optimism that accepts whatever is as the best of all possible things in the best of all possible worlds. Their descendants, strong men sprung from a strong stock, have the same spirit. The American of to-day is properly dissatisfied, always wanting something better, always trying to reform, ever seeking to improve himself and his conditions, which is the long struggle that leads to perfection.

Tolerance, a courteous yielding of individual opinion to that of an adversary and a recognition that although men may differ there is some merit

in the argument of an opponent, was not a virtue of the seventeenth century; but religious intolerance has always been much harsher than political, unless the latter, under the guise of a civil polity, involved the supremacy of the Church. Virginia was not free from the prevailing harshness of the age, but it was a more tolerant community than Massachusetts, and by contrast it seemed to be more liberal, as if its morals were looser and the state of society generally more lax. And yet in that early day, about the time that Puritanism was seeking a foothold in Massachusetts, Virginia enacted a code of blue laws that should have compelled the admiration of the most rigid Puritan. Drunkenness was a crime to be severely punished. Men must dress according to their station in life, and every married man had a direct interest in preventing the undue extravagance of his wife, as they were assessed "according to his own and his wife's apparel.” Maidens who flirted and men who engaged themselves to more than one woman at the same time were liable to be whipped or fined. The crime of bringing the governor into contempt or ridicule was punished by the pillory, and to disparage a minister was to risk the censure of the governor and council. "Profane swearing" could be indulged in only at the risk of a shilling an oath. To make a journey upon the Sabbath, "except in case of emergent necessitie," was punishable by a fine of one hundred pounds of tobacco. The code

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