Woodrow Wilson

“ Charles and James and William all showed that they meant to be veritable sovereigns, and had no thought but that the colonists in America, like all other Englishmen, should be their subjects; and here was their opportunity to be masters upon an imperial scale and with an imperial excuse. In Europe, England beheld France her most formidable foe ; she must look to it that Louis and his ministers take no advantage in America. The colonies, no less than the Channel itself, were become the frontiers of an empire—and there must be no trespass upon English soil by the French. ”

“ Pennsylvania alone, in the single year 1729, could reckon five thousand of these sturdy people who had come to multiply and strengthen her settlements.
It was to the middle colonies that most foreigners came, and their coming gave to the towns and farms of that region a variety of tongues and customs, of manners and trades and ways of life and worship, to be found nowhere else. Boston, with all its trade and seafaring, had no touch of that cosmopolitan character which New York had taken on quite inevitably in the course of her varying fortunes, and which Philadelphia had assumed by choice ”

“ Population was thus not a little compacted, while the colonies were drawn by insensible degrees to feel a certain community of interest and cultivate a certain community of opinion.
An expanding life, widened fields of enterprise and adventure, quickened hopes, and the fair prospects of a growing empire everywhere heartened strong men in the colonies to steady endeavor when the new century opened—the scheming, calculating eighteenth century, so unimpassioned and conventional at first, so tempestuous at last. ”

“ And even those who stayed in Virginia had most of them the tradition of refinement, spoke the mother tongue purely and with a proper relish, and maintained themselves somehow, with perhaps an added touch of simplicity that was their own, in the practices of a cultivated race.
No one in Virginia thought that " becoming a mere scholar" was "a desirable education for a gentleman." He ought to "become acquainted with men and things rather than books." Books must serve only to deepen and widen the knowledge he should get by observation and a free intercourse with those about him. ”

“ They had even kept the English character as they had received it, against the touch of time and social revolution, until Virginians seemed like elder Englishmen. England changed, but Virginia did not. There landed estates spread themselves with an ample acreage along the margins of the streams that every- where threaded the virgin woodland; and the planter drew about him a body of dependants who knew no other master; to whom came, in their seclusion, none of that quick air of change that had so stirred in England throughout all her century of revolution. ”

“ Her people, close upon a hundred thousand strong, had fallen into the order of life they were to maintain. They were no longer colonists merely, but citizens of a commonwealth of which they began to be very proud, not least because they saw a noble breed of public men spring out of their own loins to lead them. Though they were scattered, they were not divided. There was, after all, no real isolation for any man in Virginia, for all that he lived so much apart and was a sort of lord within his rustic barony. ”

“ The militia are the only standing forces in Virginia," he says, very demurely, and " they are happy in the enjoyment of an everlasting peace." But Colonel Byrd is very merry, like a man of sense, not contriving the jest, but only letting it slip, revealing it; looks very shrewdly into things, and very wisely, too, but with an easy eye, a disengaged conscience, keeping tally of the score like one who attends but is not too deeply concerned. ”

“ A new migration had come out of England to the colonies, and Englishmen looked with fresh confidence to see their countrymen build an empire in America. And yet perhaps not an empire of pure English blood. New York was for long scarcely the less a Dutch province, for all she had changed owners, and saw Englishmen crowd in to control her trade. There were Swedes still upon the Delaware; and Pennsylvania mustered among her colonists, besides a strange mixture out of many nations — Germans, French, Dutch, Finns, and English. ”

“ New England, through all her jurisdictions, remained a body of churches, as well as a body of towns, submissive to the doctrine and discipline of her learned clergy, keeping the old traditions distinct, indubitable, alike in her schools and her meetinghouses. Even in Rhode Island, where there had from the first been such diversity of creed and license of individual belief, there was little variety of type among the people, for all they counted themselves so free to be what they would. ”

“ Their merchants had presently their own fleets and markets. Their hardy people took more and more to the sea,, lived the rough life of the ocean ways with a relish, beat in their small craft up and down the whole coast of the continent, drove bargains everywhere, and everywhere added a touch to their reputation as doughty sea-dogs and shrewd traders. The population that after a while came to New England did not stay to be sifted before attempting the voyage out of the Old World, and the quaint sedateness of the settlements began to be broken by a novel variety. New men beset the old order ”

“ Official occupations gave him occasion while yet a very young man to handle familiarly the records of the colony, the intimate letters of its daily life, and he took a proud man's pleasure in extracting from them, and from the traditions of those who still carried much of the simple history in their own recollections of a stirring life, a frank and genial story of what had been done and seen in Virginia. ”

“ The law of the empire might be what it would in the mouths of English judges at home; it did not alter the practice of the colonies. The courts in England might say with what emphasis they liked that Virginia, " being a conquered country, their law is what the King pleases"; it was none the less necessary for the King's Governor to keep on terms with the people's representatives. " Our government is so happily constituted," writes Colonel Byrd to his friend in the Barbadoes, " that a governor must first outwit us before he can oppress us. ”

“ It was a country in which men kept their individuality very handsomely withal. If there was no town life, there were no town manners either, no village conventionalities to make all men of one carriage and pattern and manner of living. Every head of a family was head also of an establishment, and could live with a self- respect and freedom which were subject to no man's private scrutiny. He had leave, in his independence, to be himself quite naturally, and did not need to justify his liberty by excuses. ”

“ Two wars came and went which brought France and England to arms against each other in America, as in Europe, but they passed away without decisive incident in the New World, and there followed upon them thirty years of utfeventful peace, during which affairs hung at a nice balance, and the colonies took counsel, each for itself, how they should prosper. ”

“ GEORGE WASHINGTON was bred a gentleman and a man of honor in the free school of Virginian society, with the generation that first learned what it meant to maintain English communities in America in safety and a self-respecting independence. ”

“ The men of the colonies were not so new as their continent in the ways of civilization. They were Old World men put upon fresh coasts and a forest frontier, to make the most of them, create markets, build a new trade, become masters of vast resources as yet untouched and incalculable ”

“ It soon grew to be nothing singular to see well-to-do men go every year to England upon some errand of profit or pleasure.
It was with such a region and such stirring neighbors that the young Washingtons identified themselves while they were yet youths in their twenties; and there they prospered shrewdly with the rest. Prudent men and men of character readily accumulated estates in the untouched glades and forests of Westmoreland. The season of their coming, moreover, sadly as things seemed to go in 1656, turned out propitious. ”

“ New York cared little what the French did, if only the Iroquois could be kept quiet and she could get her furs in the season, and find a market for them abroad or among the French themselves; Virginia had no eye for any movement upon the frontiers that did not menace her own fair valleys within the mountains with hostile occupation; the Carolinas were as yet too young to be serviceable, and New Jersey too remote from points of danger. Nowhere could either men or supplies be had for use against the French except by the vote of a colonial assembly. ”

“ Colonel Byrd was not at a loss to find interesting ways in which, even a busy man might make shift to enjoy " the Carolina felicity of having nothing to do." A rough people lived upon that frontier in his day, who showed themselves very anxious to be put upon the southern side of the line; for, if taken into Virginia, " they must have submitted to some sort of order and government; whereas in North Carolina every one does what seems best in his own eyes." ”

“ The colonies must not pass England by even in their trade with one another. What they could not produce themselves they must bring straight from England; what they had to dispose of they must send straight to England. If they would exchange among themselves they must make England by the way, so that English merchants should be their middlemen and factors; or else, if they must needs carry direct from port to port of their own coasts, they must pay such duties as they would have paid in English ports had they actually gone the intermediate voyage to England preferred by the statutes. ”

“ No man born in Virginia had a greater property than he, a house more luxuriously appointed, or a part to play more princely ; and no man knew the value of position and wealth and social consideration more appreciatively. His breeding had greatly quickened his perception of such things. He had had a long training abroad, had kept very noble company alike in England and on the Continent, had been called to the bar in the Middle Temple and chosen a Fellow of the Royal Society, and so had, wron his freedom of. ”

“ The common feature of the new time, with its novel enterprises and its general immigration, was that the colonies everywhere, whether young or old, felt a keen stimulation and a new interest in affairs beyond their borders. A partial exchange of population began, a noticeable intercolonial migration. Whole congregations came out of New England to found towns in New Jersey, and individuals out of every colony ventured more freely than before to exchange one region for another, in order to coax health or fortune. ”

“ When Virginians wrote, therefore, you might look to find them using, not studied phrases, but a style that smacked fresh of all the free elements of good talk—not like scholars or professed students, but like gentlemen of leisure and cultivated men of affairs—with a subtle, not unpleasing flavor of egotism, and the racy directness of speech, withal, that men may use who are sure of their position. ”

“ English frontiersmen and traders, though they had no advancing military posts behind them, were none the less quick to go themselves deep into the shadowed wilderness, there to meet the French face to face in their own haunts. ”

“ It was a country in which news and opinions and friendships passed freely current; where men knew each other with a rare leisurely intimacy, and enjoyed their easy, unforced intercourse with a keen and lasting relish. ”

“ The colonies, meanwhile, might gather some of the fruits of experience; might learn how safe it was to be selfish, and how unsafe, if they hoped to prosper and be free; might perceive where their common interests lay, and their common power; might in some degree steady their lives and define their policy against the coming of more peaceful times. ”

“ Colonists were sent to the mouth of the vast river, posts presently dotted its banks here and there spreading stream, and the English, their eyes at last caught by the stealthy movement, looked in a short space to see French settlements " running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico." ”

“ More youths went from the Northern Neck to England for their education, no doubt, than from any other part of Virginia. The counties there were somewhat closer than the rest to the sea, bred more merchants and travellers, kept up a more intimate correspondence both by travel and by letter with Bristol and London and all the old English homes. ”

“ They would supply neither men nor money, moreover. England must send her own armies to America, fight France there as she would have fought her in Europe, and pay the reckoning herself out of her own treasury, getting from the colonies, the while, only such wayward and niggardly aid as they chose to give. ”

“ The neighborhood is at much the same distance as in the country in England, but with this advantage, that all the better sort of people have been abroad and seen the world, by which means they are free from that stiffness and formality which discover more civility than kindness. ”

“ His own manly character, speaking out every- where, as it does, in lively phrase and candid meaning, is itself evidence of the wholesome native air he so praises in Virginia.
He thought himself justified in loving a country where " plantations, orchards, and gardens constantly afford fragrant and delightful walks. In their woods and fields they have an unknown variety of vegetables and other rarities of nature to discover and observe. They have hunting, fishing, and fowling, with which they entertain themselves in a thousand ways. ”