Page:The North Carolina Historical Review - Volume 1, Number 1.pdf/16

14 nation. The changes of the past century have made over-heavy drafts upon rustic New England.

That part of the country met the competition of western agriculture more than half way and on a twofold plan. It sent its sons and daughters in great streams to people the prairies, and to construct social and political democracies of New England type all the way to Oregon. Meanwhile, with the trained ingenuity of its people, it converted New England into a great workshop. Its centers of manufacturing and commerce gave employment to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from many foreign countries. With all these changes in population elements, the New England States are still under the spell of their noble history and their great traditions; and in hundreds of their rural neighborhoods the continuity of life has not been fatally broken or altered, and there are many hopeful evidences of a recovery of local vigor. There will be no return to the conditions of the past, but the new order of things cannot fail to find inspiration in the minute study of local history.

It has been assumed that the structure of early society in the northern colonies was wholly different from that of the colonies south of the Potomac. Those whose study has not been thorough and critical have found it easy to assume that New England and the central colonies were settled by a somewhat uniform type of plain middle-class farmers, while the southern colonies were from the beginning dominated by a land-holding aristocracy akin to that of Great Britain. As a matter of severe historical truth, a few obvious exceptions being admitted, there was a remarkable similarity in the social status of the people who formed our early societies all along the Atlantic seaboard.

There were, indeed, different systems under which land was acquired. In New England, the township lands were as a rule granted to a group of people who proceeded to sub-divide and allot the area of the little democracy upon principles of equality. In Virginia, the land was more generally acquired in large tracts by individuals, who proceeded to find purchasers and to colonize at some profit to themselves. The New England system resulted in closer settlement and better organized local groups. But, quite contrary to the accepted view, Virginia—