Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/78

 the popular party; Lord Craven and Sir John Colleton, with slighter but still considerable claims upon the grace of Charles II. Upon these favorites as proprietors, Charles bestowed a great province, known as Carolina, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, an estate which they were to rule jointly as pleased their fancies, subject to the laws of England and with the consent of a local assembly.

A few years after the charter was sealed, Shaftesbury engaged John Locke, political philosopher and Whig pamphleteer, to frame a constitution for their imperial domain. This task the learned bookman discharged by drafting one of the most fantastic documents now to be found in the moldering archives of disillusionment. He proposed that the eldest proprietor should be palatine and that the others should be admiral, chamberlain, constable, chief justice, high steward, and treasurer, according to lot. The proprietors were to reserve one-fifth of the land as their personal property; another large section was to be laid out into baronies and manors to be held by an aristocracy and tilled by hereditary serfs bound to the soil; and the remainder was to be sold to freeholders.

In keeping with this economic structure, an elaborate system of government including a popular assembly was devised, thus reflecting the Whig ideal of a perfect order for the wilderness—an order composed of an aristocracy resting upon servile labor held in check by a body of yeomen—the grand purpose being, as Locke said, to avoid "a numerous democracy," and at the same time to create an administration "most agreeable to the monarchy." This amusing constitution with a high-sounding title was ratified by the proprietors and declared in force, but it could no more be realized in Carolina than in the moon. Its interest to-day lies in the fact that it reveals the type of society which the Whigs, the most liberal of the governing classes in England, would have established in America if they had not been defeated by the irrepressible and stubborn realities of life on the frontier.