It was easier to rob than to mine; and, while Spain performed the labor in the bowels of the earth, England took the profit as a prize on the sea! Such were some of the elements of maritime success, which weakened Spain by draining her colonial wealth, while it enriched her rival and injured the Catholic sovereign.

Yet, in the ranks of these adventurers, there were men of honest purpose; and, among the first whose designs of colonization on this continent were unquestionably conceived in a spirit of discovery and speculation, was the half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh—Sir Humphrey Gilbert. But Sir Humphrey, while pursuing his northern adventures, was unluckily lost at sea, and Sir Walter took up the thread where his relative dropped it. I regret that I have not time to pursue this subject, and can only say that his enterprises were, doubtless, the germ of that colonization, which, by degrees, has filled up and formed our Union.

You will remember the striking difference between colonization from England, and the colonization from other nations of ancient and modern times. The short, imperfect navigation of the Greeks, along the shores and among the islands of their inland sea, made colonization rather a diffusive overflow, than an adventurous transplanting of their people. They were urged to this oozing emigration either by personal want, by the command of law, or by the oracles of their gods, who doubtless spoke under the authority of law. Where the national religion was a unit in faith, there was no persecution to drive men off, nor had the spirit of adventure seized those primitive classics with the zeal of "annexation" that animated after ages.

The Roman colonies were massive, military progresses of population, seeking to spread national power by conquest and permanent encampment.

Portugal and Spain, mingled avarice and dominion in their conquests or occupation of new lands.

The French Protestants were, to a great extent, prevented by the bigotry of their home government, as well as by foreign jealousy, from obtaining a sanctuary in America. France drove the refugees chiefly into other European countries, where they established their manufacturing industry; and thus, fanaticism kept out of America laborious multitudes who would have pressed hard on the British settlements. In the islands, a small trade and the investment of money, rather than the desire to acquire fortune by personal industry, were the motives of the early and regular emigration of Frenchmen.

The Dutch, devoted to trade, generally located themselves where they "have just room enough to manifest the miracles of frugality and diligence."[3]

Thus, wherever we trace mankind abandoning its home, in ancient or modern days, we find a selfish motive, a superstitious command, a love of wealth, a lust of power, or a spirit of robbery, controlling the movement. The first adventurous effort towards the realization of actual settlement on this continent, was, as we have seen, made by the persecuted Huguenots, and was, probably, an attempt rather to fly from oppression, than to establish religious freedom. The first English settlement, also, was founded more upon speculation than on any novel or exalted principle. There was a quest of gold, a desire for land, and an honest hope of improving personal fortunes.

Virginia had been a charter government, but, in 1624, it was merged in the Royal Government. The crown reassumed the dominion it had granted to others. Virginia, in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, although exhibiting some prosperous phases, was nothing more than a delicate off-shoot from the British stock, somewhat vigorous for its change to virgin soil, but likely to bear the same fruit as its parent tree. Virginia was a limb timidly transplanted,—not a branch torn off, and flung to wither or to fertilize new realms by its decay. This continent, with all that a century and a half of maritime coasting had done for it, was but thinly sprinkled with settlements, which bore the same proportion to the vast continental wilderness that single ships or small squadrons bear to the illimitable sea. But the spirit of adventure, the desire for refuge, the dream of liberty, were soon to plant the seeds of a new civilization in the Western World.

Henry VIII, Founder of the English Church, as he had, whilom, been, Defender of the Roman Faith, was no friend of toleration; but the rigor of his system was somewhat relaxed during the reign of the sixth Edward. Mary, daughter of Henry, and sister of Edward, re-constructed the great ancestral church, and the world is hardly divided in opinion as to the character of her reign. Elizabeth re-established the church that had been founded by her father; and her successor James I of England and VI of Scotland,—the Protestant son of a Catholic mother,—while he openly adhered to the church of his realm, could not avoid some exhibitions of coquettish tenderness for the faith of his slaughtered parent.

But, amid all these changes, there was one class upon which the wrath of the Church of England and of the Church of Rome, met in accordant severity;—this was the Puritan and ultra Puritan sect,—to which I have alluded at the commencement of this discourse,—whose lot was even more disastrous under the Protestant Elizabeth, than under the Catholic Mary. The remorseless courts of her commissioners, who inquisitorially tried these religionists by interrogation on oath, imprisoned them, if they remained lawfully silent and condemned them if they honestly confessed!

A congregation of these sectaries had existed for some time on the boundaries of Lincoln, Nottingham and York, under the guidance of Richard Clifton and John Robinson, the latter of whom was a modest, polished, and learned man. This christian fold was organized about 1602; but worried by ceaseless persecution, it fled to Holland, where its members, fearing they would be absorbed in the country that had entertained them so hospitably, resolved in 1620 to remove to that portion of the great American wilderness, known as North Virginia. Such, in the chronology of our Continent, was the first decisive emigration of our parent people to the New World, for the sake of opinion.

It is neither my purpose, nor is it necessary, to sketch the subsequent history of this New England emigration, or of the followers, who swelled it into colonial significance.

Its great characteristic, seems to me, to have been, an unalterable will to worship God according to its own sectarian ideas, and to afford an equal right and protection to all who thought as it did, or were willing to conform to its despotic and anchoritic austerity. It is not very clear, what were its notions of abstract political liberty; yet there can be very little doubt what its practical opinions of equality must have been, when we remember the common dangers, duties, and interests of such a band of emigrants on the dreary, ice-bound, savage haunted, coasts of Massachusetts.

may well be asked of a community which for so long a time, had been the guest of foreigners, and now saw the first great human and divine law of liberty and equality, taught by the compulsion of labor and mutual protection, on a strip of land between the sea and the forest. The colonists were literally reduced to first principles; they were stripped of