Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/19

 Rh The writers bred in feudal countries furnish about half of our daily literature. Such men and women do not know the real basis of half our institutions. But more than half of those institutions are based upon these necessities of early times. The people who settled Virginia or Massachusetts or New Hampshire, from the very nature of the case, had to work together. If they built a meeting house, all of them had to join in framing it, in raising the frame, in shingling it, and in making the highway which led to it. All of them joined in. When there came a herd or school of whales, all the neighbors had to turn out for their store of oil, and did. So it came of course, one does not say it happened—it came of course—that when the people who had built that meeting house had to name the minister who should conduct its services, they all of them voted in that matter; and though it were not of course, it did fall out that when fifty or sixty of them built a ship and went to sea to hunt whales "in both oceans," all of the people who assisted in this enterprise were considered, whether in its profits or in its failures—each man had his "lay"—the captain more, the cook least, but they acted together. What followed was that the boy who served as scullion when he was ten years old, might be the captain in a ship when he was thirty. Scullion or captain, he was part of the concern, a differential, the mathematicians would say, but a differential from which you could calculate an infinite orbit.

Many other things followed which were utterly un-European. There had to be a lighthouse built, perhaps at the opening of Boston Harbor, perhaps on the highlands of Staten Island, perhaps at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, or at the top finger nail of the arm of Cape Cod. In England, in Denmark, or on the Rhine, such a lighthouse would have been built by the feudal lord who owned the headland. He would have exacted toll from everybody who passed and what was worse, he would have collected it. In America, on the other hand, from the very beginning, the People built the lighthouse, provided the lamps, took care of the lighthouse from hour to hour.