“ Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination, the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance, canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for which New England had reason to be grateful. ”

“ It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to wield, as the years which followed proved. ”

“ The conditions of life in the colonies were hardly favorable to a church which brands private reasoning as heresy; and even in Maryland—which was established, if not as a Catholic colony, yet by a nobleman of that [191] faith—there were, after fifty years of existence, only about one hundred Romanists. Public opinion and the political situation in England had now raised this bugbear of popery. It was but the faint echo of the cry which prompted those restrictions in the instructions to King William’s governor which sought to enforce in New York the policy long in vogue in the mother country. ”

“ The French experiments at colonization in America had proved a source of expense so great as to check the sympathy and crush the hopes of the Court. The vessels of France could only communicate with her colonies by eluding the search of the English ships widely scattered over the sea. Although no formal declaration of war was made until 1756, England did not hesitate to seize French merchant-vessels and to attack French men-of-war, and she backed the pretensions of her colonists with solid arguments clad in red coats and bearing glittering bayonets. ”

“ The wielding of the blood-dripping knife and tomahawk, the conflagration of dwellings and barns, the murderous rush upon the victims who, here and there, had hidden themselves and who ran out from the blazing fires to a fate scarcely less dreadful, with other horrors we are unwilling to relate, continued for three days. One hundred and fifty were slain on the Roanoke, more than sixty at Newbern, an unknown number near Bath; and the carnage was stopped only by the exhaustion and besotted drunkenness of the bloodstained savages. Governor Hyde was powerless to confront the foe. ”

“ Governor and council, soldier, priest, and peasant, all bore upon their persons the marks that they were Frenchmen whose utmost effort was to reproduce in the wilds of America the artificial condition of society which had found its perfect expression in Versailles. Autocratic as was Frontenac, unlikely as he was to do anything which should foster popular notions of liberty, or in any way endanger monarchical institutions,—even he drew down upon himself a rebuke from the Court for giving too much heed to the people in his scheme of reorganization. ”

“ In France there was no state but the king; in Canada there could be none but the governor. Events cluster around the lives of individuals. According to the discretion of the leaders the prospects of the colony rise and fall. Stories of the machinations of priests at Quebec and at Montreal, of their heroic sufferings at the hands of the Hurons and the Iroquois, and of individual deeds of valor performed by soldiers, fill the pages of the record. The prosperity of the colony rested upon the fate of a single industry,—the trade in peltries. ”

“ The cruel policy of maintaining the alliance with the Abenakis, and at the same time securing quiet in Canada by encouraging raids upon the defenceless towns of New England, not only left a stain upon the reputation of Vaudreuil, but it also hastened the end of French power in America by convincing the growing, prosperous, and powerful colonies known as New England that the only path to permanent peace lay through the downfall of French rule in Canada. ”

“ After commending in the highest terms the woods and meadows, mines and odoriferous plants, soil and climate, fruits and game, streams and hills, flowers and agricultural capabilities, he exhibited an elaborate plan of the Margravate, in which he did not propose to satisfy himself “with building here and there a fort,—the fatal practice of America,—but so to dispose the habitations and divisions of the land that not alone our houses, but whatever we possess, will be inclosed by military lines impregnable against the savages, and which will make our whole plantation one continued fortress.” ”

“ To preserve the proper relations to the parent State, the colony should have within itself elements of wealth which should enrich its projectors; it should absorb the productions of the State which founded it; and in no event ought it to come into competition with its progenitor. The form of the French government was so logical that its colonies could be but mimic representations of France. Priests and nuns, soldiers and peasants, nobles and seigniors, responded to the royal order, and moved at the royal dictation in the miniature Court at Quebec much the same as at Paris. ”

“ For more than twenty years North Carolina was governed by a deputy of the governor at Charleston, or (when there was no deputy appointed) by the president of her own council. The Albemarle colony had become to the Proprietors only a source of vexation. At any rate, they acted wisely in leaving its management, in some measure, under the control of those more conversant with its affairs than their lordships in England could possibly be. Their own mismanagement, in truth, was the principal cause of the turbulent spirit of the people. ”

“ France shipped a few soldiers and some stores to Canada. Some of her vessels succeeded in running the gauntlet of the English cruisers, but more were driven ashore or captured. The native Canadians, more French than Frenchmen themselves, rallied to the support of the Government which had strangled every sign of independent life in their country. Old men and children joined the ranks to repel the invader; and again we have the story repeated of scant crops improperly harvested because of lack of field hands, and thereafter actual suffering for food in this old and well-established colony. ”

“ Bellomont, in addressing the first assembly under his administration, made a bid for popular favor by finding fault with the doings of his predecessor, who had left him as a legacy “difficulties to struggle with, a divided people, an empty treasury, a few miserable, naked, half-starved soldiers, being not half the number the king allowed pay for, the fortifications, and even the governor’s house, very much out of repairs, and, in a word, gentlemen (he said) , the whole government out of frame.” The assembly was to find remedies, that is, money wherewith to repair all these evils. ”

“ There was a further principle announced by the people: that the Proprietors could send what “instructions” they pleased, but they certainly could never have intended that they should have the force of statute laws without the assent and approbation of the people, except in such matters as wholly belonged to their direction according to the charter. With so intelligent and progressive a people to control, the almost impotent “absolute lords” on the other side of the Atlantic might well have written to Ludwell as they did to Morton, “Are you to govern the people, or the people you?” ”

“ As a soldier he had learned the value of moderation; and not forgetting it in civil life, his administration was distinguished by prudence and a regard for the interests of the province, while his peaceful Indian policy secured for the colony a period of almost unprecedented prosperity. Planted in 1682, nearly fifty years later than her neighbors, Pennsylvania could boast in 1735 that her chief city, Philadelphia, was the second in size in the colonies, and her white population larger than that of Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas. ”

“ There can be little dispute about what they did and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of those influences which place men in relation to other times than their own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries. ”

“ Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day, 1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty one. ”

“ To carry out this policy, a grand scheme of government, called the Fundamental Constitutions, was framed by Shaftesbury and the philosopher Locke, and solemnly confirmed as a compact among themselves,—the Proprietors,—and which was to be unalterable forever. A scheme more utopian, more unsuited to the actual condition of the colonists, could hardly have been devised. Yet its adoption by the people was recommended, ordered, stubbornly insisted on by their lordships at the risk of balking—as, for a while, it did balk—the prosperity of their colony. ”

“ His vigorous measures had restored the self-respect of his countrymen, and had inspired with wholesome fear the wily savages who threatened the natural path of his fur-trade. The tax upon the people, however, had been frightful. A French population of less than twelve thousand had been called upon to defend a frontier of hundreds of miles against the attacks of a jealous and warlike confederacy of Indians, who, in addition to their own sagacious views upon the policy of maintaining these wars, were inspired thereto by the great rival of France behind them. ”

“ The winter passed with as much comfort as the severe climate and a shattered town would permit. There were sick and wounded to comfort, and the sisters of the hospitals devoted themselves to French and English alike. A certain rugged honesty in Murray won the citizens who remained, and the hours were beguiled in part by the spirits of the French ladies. There was an excitement in November, when a fleet of French ships from up the river tried to run the batteries, and seven or eight of them which did so carried the first despatches to France which Vaudreuil had succeeded in transmitting. ”

“ Distrust and jealousy pervaded the Government councils in Canada. Pierre François, Marquis of Vaudreuil, the successor of Duquesne in 1755, and Montcalm, whose cordial co-operation was essential, were at swords’ points. With each succeeding year the corrupt practices of Intendant Bigot were more openly carried on. With famine stalking through the streets of Montreal and Quebec, with the whole population living on short rations, and bread-stuffs at incredible prices, the opportunity for this wide-awake Intendant to make money was never better. ”

“ At the opening of the new century, we must cease to look upon South Carolina as the home of indigent emigrants, struggling for subsistence. While numerous slaves cultivated the extensive plantations, their owners, educated gentlemen, and here and there of noble families in England, had abundant leisure for social intercourse, living as they did in proximity to each other, and in easy access to Charles Town, where the governor resided, the courts and legislature convened, and the public offices were kept. ”

“ While Shirley had been gone, the good town had been much exercised over an attempt to introduce the drama, and the performance of Otway’s Orphan at a coffee-house in King Street had stirred the legislature to pass a law against stage plays. The journals of Goelet [301] and others give us some glimpses of life, however, far from prudish, and show that human nature was not altogether suppressed, nor all of the good people quite as stiff as Blackburn was now painting them.
Notwithstanding his hymeneal entanglement, Shirley was unquestionably the most powerful Englishman at this time in America. ”