foes, who had to tame the wilderness and bring barren places under cultivation and build cities; but they were not without results. They made for character, not the finest or highest type, it is true, but a certain strength was necessary at a time when rude strength was essential to future development. These quarrels taught the great truth that constitutions are made for men and not men for constitutions, and that when men have outgrown their constitutions, there is a way to discard that which is no longer useful and still retain the essence and spirit of that which is vital.

In everything that happened in America from the time when the first settlers landed in Jamestown until the warning cry rang out in the stillness of that April night and the belfry's beacon light called a nation into arms, there is nakedly revealed the one great weakness of English rule. No English statesman was able to grasp the obvious truth that the colonies had outgrown their institutions and were simply keeping pace with their development. Proprietors in the beginning, and the Crown and its ministers later, gave to these men a set of rules under the name of charters and constitutions that were supposed to be sufficient and needed neither enlargement nor modification. They made no provision for expansion, they made no allowance for that physical and spiritual growth that was inevitable if the colonies were to live, and could only fail to reveal itself if the colonists remained mere bands

of struggling settlers unable to stand on their own feet and always looking to the mother country for support. But they became quickly self-sustaining, and developed that peculiarly self-reliant temper which is a part of the American inheritance; the indifference and carelessness of proprietors and ministers allowed them little by little to claim a still greater control of their own affairs, which stimulated them to demand even more, and finally welded the colonists into a cohesive mass whose aims and purposes were antagonistic to those of their rulers. Such a training can have only one ending. The strain becomes greater year by year, but goes on until the tension becomes too great and the system breaks down.1

Virginia was influenced politically and materially -and the material conditions of a country are always reflected in the moral and psychological attitude of its people — by tobacco; South Carolina was influenced in the same way by its two great staples, indigo and rice; the former, however, having only a brief life and giving place to cotton, which has had the widest effect on the lives and character

1 Since the above was written, the second volume of Channing's History of the United States has appeared, and the view so freely expressed by this writer that the revolution of 1776 had long been smouldering is sustained by that eminent American authority. "In recent years," he says, “English writers have united in objurgating George III and the stupid, ignorant politicians who guided England's affairs in the fifteen years before 1775; on their shoulders have been laid the faults which brought about the American revolution; but the causes of that cataclysm lie further back and may be largely found in the settlement of the imperial constitution in the years immediately following William's accession to power." - Vol. ii, p. 219.

of its cultivators. Rice, in a wild state, has always been found in South Carolina, but cultivated rice was introduced into the colony by accident, when a ship from Madagascar brought a bag of rice to Charleston in 1693 and it was planted experimentally. It was found that the swamps of the colony were peculiarly suitable for its propagation, and it was soon cultivated on a large and profitable scale and gave to the South Carolinians the same solid foundation for wealth that tobacco had given to the Virginians, but with far more disastrous physical and moral results. The cultivation of tobacco is not more physically exhausting than any other kind of farming in healthy surroundings, but rice must be grown in swamps and marshy lands under tropical heat, which is fatal to the white man; and the same conditions govern the growing of indigo. In those days rice culture was to other agriculture what the sweated industries of to-day are to manufacturing carried on more scientifically; but the toll in human life that the sweatshop pays does not stand in the way of its existence, and as misery and want drive workers into the sweatshop and society connives at the sacrifice, so force and cunning found labor for the deadly rice-fields. White men were unable to work there, but the negro and Indian could, and were regarded by the proprietor simply as so much machinery, which, having converted a certain amount of raw material into the finished product, is worn out in the operation and must be replaced.

Negroes were imported in such large quantities that every year each man could raise enough indigo or rice more than to repay the cost of his purchase; so that it was cheaper for the South Carolina proprietor to work his slaves to death than to take care of them or to replenish the stock by breeding. "Assuming, then, that human nature in South Carolina was neither better nor worse than in other parts of the civilized world, we need not be surprised when told that the relations between master and slave were noticeably different from what they were in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The negroes of the southern colony were reputed to be more brutal and unmanageable than those to the northward." In the northern colonies slaves had been softened by contact with civilization and were, as a rule, properly fed and housed and treated without undue harshness; it was as much to the advantage of the slaveholder, whose wealth was in slaves, to keep them in condition so as to get the greatest profit from their labor and their breeding, as it was properly to care for his stock. But in South Carolina no such considerations prevailed, and the slaves were usually brought direct from the savage wilds of Africa to fall under the lash of the overseer in the rice-fields.

The effect of slavery was more demoralizing in South Carolina than in any other colony. In Vir

1 Fiske: Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, vol. ii, p. 327. Cf. Bruce: Economic History of Virginia, vol. ii, p. 108.

ginia and Maryland, great as the evils of slavery were in degrading free white labor, there was still room for the white indented servant and the freeman, but in South Carolina that was impossible, and it was a colony not of white men using the labor of slaves, but a colony of slaves with a few white masters. In 1760, of the total population of 150,000 three quarters were said to be slaves, while in the adjoining colony of North Carolina there were only 50,000 slaves in a population of 200,000. In Virginia and Maryland the proprietors lived on their plantations surrounded by their slaves, and the life was both patriarchal and feudal; in South Carolina it was seldom that a rice planter lived on his estate, and he gravitated naturally to Charleston, which occupied the same relation to the colony as London did to the rest of England. In Virginia and Maryland the planter had little fear from his slaves, but in South Carolina that dread was never absent; the planter always went armed (to that we can doubtless trace the demoralizing modern custom of the Southern man carrying a pistol and the freedom with which he uses it on the slightest provocation); and the slave insurrection of South Carolina of 1740 is a part of its early history.

Because most of the landed proprietors of South Carolina lived in Charleston, that city naturally became the centre of the life of the colony and absorbed not only its wealth and fashion, but also its commercial activity. Virginia, as we have seen, was