Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/21

8 since the last battle of the Revolution. The hostility of that contest is only a matter of history to the mass of Britons or Americans, not of daily consciousness; and as this disturbing force is withdrawn, the two nations see and feel more distinctly their points of agreement, and become conscious that they are both but one people.

The transfer of the colonists of England to the western world was an event of great importance to mankind; they found a virgin continent, on which to set up and organize their ideas, and develop their faculties. They had no enemies but the wilderness and its savage occupants. I doubt not that, if the emigrant had remained at home, it would have taken a thousand years to attain the same general development now reached by the free States of North America* The settlers carried with them the best ideas and the best institutions of their native land— the arts and sciences of England, the forms of a representative government, the trial by jury, the common law, the ideas of Christianity, and the traditions of the human race. In the woods, far from help, they were forced to become self-reliant and thrifty men. It is instructive to see what has come of the experiment. It is but two hundred and forty-six years since the settlement of Jamestown—not two hundred and thirty-four years since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth ; what a development since that time—of numbers, of riches, of material and spiritual power!

In the ninth century. Kerb Flokki, a half-mythical person, "let loose his three crows," it is said, seeking land to the west and north of the Orkneys, and went to Iceland. In the tenth century, Gunnbjiom, and Eirek the Red, discovered Greenland, an " ugly and right hateful country," as Paul Egede calls it. In the eleventh century, Leife, son of Eirek, with Tyrker the Southerner, discovered Vinland, some part of North America, but whether Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or New England, I shall leave others to determine. It is not yet four hundred years since Columbus first dropped his anchor at San Salvador, and Cabot discovered the continent of America, and cruised along its shores from Hudson's Bay to Florida, seeking for a passage to the East Indies. In 1608 the first permanent British settlement was made in