Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/724

716 must have had the enthusiasm of their time in its most earnest form. Each man came here intent upon his right to worship God in his own way. That he could never forget. It had been impressed upon him by everything which can affect the understanding or touch the heart of man,—by the memory of success and defeat,—by his own sufferings and the martyrdom of his brethren,—by Bunyan's fable and by Milton's song.

But they did not lack bigotry. They were as ready to persecute those who differed with them here as they had been at home. The last and greatest social truth, that the surest way of protecting our own liberties is by respecting those of others, was forced upon the colonists. So general had been the stimulants to emigration, that every European sect and party was represented in America. Hither came Calvinists and Lutherans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Conformists and Non-Conformists, the precise Quaker and the elegant Huguenot, those who fled from the tyranny of Louis and those who fled from the tyranny of Charles, worshippers of the Virgin and men who believed that to kneel before a crucifix was as idolatrous as to kneel before the seven-headed idols of Hindostan. These sects and parties were so equally balanced that toleration became a necessity. Seeing that they could not oppress, men were led to think oppression wrong, and toleration was exalted to a virtue. The theocratic spirit which prevailed at first passed away, and the great principle was established that governments have nothing to do with religion. It does not require much penetration to discover that a government which has unlimited power over the person and property of the citizen will not long respect the scruples of his conscience. Religious liberty gave birth to political freedom. The separation of the settlements from each other, even in the same establishment, made local provisions necessary for defence, and for the transaction of local business, and led to the division of the government.

When united action was necessary, the colonies did not attempt to reconcile their differences; they made a union for those purposes which were common to all. The general principles which were asserted during the Revolution were logical necessities of that event. It was a rebellion against an unjust exercise of power. Why unjust? For no other reason than because the Americans had an equal right with Englishmen to govern themselves. But that right must be one which was common to all men. The rebels knew this. They did not follow Burke through his labored argument to prove that the measures of the British ministry were inexpedient. They could not defend their conduct before the world upon the narrow ground of a violation of the relations between a dependency and its mother country. Those relations were not understood, and such a defence would not have been listened to. They appealed at once to the laws of God, and for their justification addressed those universal human instincts which give us our ideas of national and individual freedom. The declaration that men are created equal excited no surprise then. They believed it without a thought that it had entered the mind of a fantastic recluse in the retirement of l'Hermitage, and, in obedience to that belief, they severed the ties of tradition and kindred, exposed their homes and the lives of those whose lives were dearer to them than their own to the rage of civil war, and placed all they hoped for and everything they loved upon the perilous hazard of the sword.

At such a time Jefferson was led to the pursuit of politics. He was not in the situation of one who, in disgust at the misery which surrounds him, retires to his study, and, from the impulses of a kind heart, the dreams of poets, and the speculations of philosophers, fashions a society in which there is neither envy, anger, ambition, nor avarice, but where, amid Arcadian joys, all men live in peace and happiness. He was compelled to think because he had need to act,—to make real laws for real societies. To do