Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/761

1607-1750.] place in American history, and had a strong influence on the ultimate development of the United States; and yet they touched the life of the people at comparatively few points. A more marked and important distinction is in the local organizations of the northern and southern colonies. All the southern colonies began as proprietary governments. Settlers went there as individuals connected only with the colony. To the individual the colony was the great political factor; his only other connexion was with his parish, to which the colony allowed few political functions; and, where political power touched him at all, it was through the colony. In time it became necessary to allow political powers to the parish or county, but they were really more judicial than political. “The southern county was a modified English shire, with the towns left out.” The whole tendency shows the character of the immigration in this part of the country, from English districts outside of the influence of the towns.

12. In New England local organization was quite different. A good example is the town of Dorchester. Organized (March 20, 1630) in Plymouth, England, when its people were on the point of embarkation for America, it took the shape of a distinct town and church before they went on shipboard. Its civil and ecclesiastical organization were complete before they landed in Massachusetts Bay and came under the jurisdiction of a chartered company. Its people governed themselves, in their town government, in all but a few points, in which the colony asserted superiority. As the colony's claims increased, the town's dissatisfaction increased. In 1635 the town migrated in a body, with its civil and ecclesiastical organization still intact, into the vacant territory of Connecticut, and there became the town of Windsor. Here, uniting with other towns, which had migrated in a similar fashion, it formed the new Commonwealth of Connecticut, in which the local liberty of the towns was fully secured in the frame of government. Rhode Island was formed in the same way, by separate towns; Vermont afterwards in the same way; and the towns of the parent colony of Massachusetts learned to claim a larger liberty than had been possible at first. Thus, all through New England, the local town organizations came to monopolize almost all ordinary governmental powers; and the counties to which the towns belonged were judicial, not political, units, marking merely the jurisdiction of the sheriff. In the annual town meetings, and in special meetings from time to time, the freemen exercised without any formal grant the powers of self-taxation, of expenditure of taxation, of trial by jury, and of a complete local government. Further, the lower houses of their colonial legislatures were made up of generally equal representations from the towns, while the upper houses were chosen from the colony at large. In this was the germ of the subsequent development of the United States senate, in which the States are equally represented, and of the house of representatives, representing the people numerically (§§ 104, 105, 109, 110).

13. The two opposite systems of the north and south found a field for conflict in the organization of the central territory after its acquisition (§ 8). The crown agents were strongly disposed to follow the more centralized system of the southern colonies, though Penn, having organized counties and restricted his legislature to a single house, based it on the counties. In New York and New Jersey the Dutch system of “patroonships” had left a simulacrum of local independence, and a stronger tendency in the same direction came in through immigration from New England. To encourage this immigration, the New Jersey proprietors gave town powers to many of them; and some of the New Jersey towns were merely transplanted New England towns. But the middle colonies

never arrived at any distinct system; at the best, their system was a conglomerate. Much the same result has been reached in the new Western States, organized under the care of the Federal Government, where the New England immigration has brought with it a demand for local self-government which has resulted in a compromise between the two systems of town units and county units.

14. Ecclesiastical divisions were at first as strong as civil diversities. The New England colonies were Congregational, and these churches were established and supported by law, except in Rhode Island, where the Baptists were numerically superior. In the royal colonies generally there was a steady disposition to establish the Church of England, and it was more or less successful. In language there were striking dissimilarities, due to a most heterogeneous immigration. It was said that every language of Europe could be found in the colony of Pennsylvania. But, after all, this diversity had no indications of persistence;

the immigration in each case had been too small to support itself. Very little of the wonderful increase of American population between 1607 and 1750 was due to immigration; most of it had come from natural increase. After the first outflow from Old to New England, in 1630-31, emigration was checked at first by the changing circumstances of the struggle between the people and the king, and, when the struggle was over, by the better-known difficulties of life in the colonies. Franklin, in 1751, when he estimated that there were “near a million English souls” in the colonies, thought that scarce eighty thousand had been brought over by sea. No matter how diverse the small immigration might have been on its arrival, there was a steady pressure on its descendants to turn them into Englishmen; and it was very successful. When Whitefield, the revivalist, visited America about 1740, he found the population sufficiently homogeneous for his preaching to take effect, all the way from Georgia to New England. The same tendency shows itself in the complete freedom of intercolonial migration. Men went from one colony to another, or held estates, or took inheritances in different colonies, without the slightest notion that they were under any essentially diverse political conditions. The whole coast, from Nova Scotia to the Spanish possessions in Florida, was one in all essential circumstances; and there was only the need of some sudden shock to crystallize it into a real political unity. Hardly anything in history is more impressive than this mustering of Englishmen on the Atlantic coast of North America, their organization of natural and simple governments, and their preparations for the final march of 3000 miles westward, unless it be the utter ignorance of the home Government and people that any such process was going on.

15. This ignorance had one singular effect in completing the difference between the new and the old country. An odd belief that European plants and animals degenerated in size and quality on transplantation to the western continent was persistent at the time even among learned men in Europe, and Jefferson felt bound to take great pains to combat it so late as the end of the 18th century. That passage in Thackeray's Virginians, where the head of the elder Virginian branch of the family returns to England, to be treated with contempt and indifference by the younger branch which had remained at home, indicates the state of mind among the influential classes in England which bent them against any admission of Americans to the honours or privileges of the English higher classes. A few titles were given; entails were maintained in the southern colonies; but there were no such systematic efforts as are necessary to maintain an aristocratic class. This may have been gratifying to the ruling class in England; but it was in reality an unconsciously