Colonies

“ And when I speak of our colonies, it is an expression; they are not ours—they are not ours in a possessory sense. They are sister States, able to treat with us from an equal position, able to hold to us, willing to hold to us, but also able to break with us. ”

“ I am not very superstitious, but I do solemnly believe that these Colonies are blessed with the smiles of Providence; and, if we may dare attempt penetrating the veil, by which he conceals his allwise dispensations from mortal eyes, that he designs that Africa shall be the refuge and the home of the descendants of its sons and daughters, torn and dragged from their native land, by lawless violence. ”

“ 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 ”

“ We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation, and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at a time when distance did not grow less. ”

“ Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had the Pope’s bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. ”

“ The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase, and carry our persons, our language and our liberties, into all climates and continents. ”

“ Emigration from one region to another, and the emission of colonies to people countries more or less distant from the residence of the parent stock, are common incidents in the history of mankind; but it has not often, perhaps never, happened, that the establishment of colonies should be attempted under circumstances, however beset with present difficulties and dangers, yet so favorable to ultimate success, and so conducive to magnificent results, as those which attended the first settlements on this part of the American continent. ”

“ Colonies, and to think of them as in a state of subordination to us, and as holding their existence in America only for our use, that it is no wonder the prejudices of many are alarmed, when they find a different doctrine maintained. ”

“ True British colonies are settlements where men from our own shores have been able to make a permanent home, found a family, and rear children in robust health. Men of our stock can only plant such colonies where a temperate climate prevails, where wheat and other cereals thrive, and where flocks and herds can be successfully reared; such colonies we have in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ”

“ De tout ce qui vient d’être exposé, il suit que tout presse de s’occuper de nouvelles colonies: l’exemple des peuples les plus sages, qui en ont fait un des grands moyens de tranquillité; le besoin de préparer le remplacement de nos colonies actuelles pour ne pas nous trouver en arrière des événements; la convenance de placer la culture de nos denrées coloniales plus près de leurs vrais cultivateurs; la nécessité de former avec les colonies les rapports les plus naturels, bien plus faciles, sans doute, dans des établissements nouveaux que dans les anciens ”

“ It is impossible to forget in the early history of the North American colonies, what facility the French displayed, in contrast with the English, in attaining communication with the children of the forest, in acquiring and retaining their confidence, in taking on their rude and uncultivated modes of life, and in shaping even their superstitions to their own selfish purposes. ”

“ Will they be of benefit to these grand and extensive colonies?—colonies enjoying perpetual summer—colonies of the richest soil—colonies containing within themselves everything necessary for their support—colonies, in fine, so varied in their quality and situation, as to be capable of bringing to perfection every tropical production ”

“ Common danger alone produced occasional signs of common action. The New England colonies, whose borders were most within reach of French raids, and whose shores reached to Acadia, showed far the most public spirit, and far the most power of combination. ”

“ The English migration and the founding of the English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in America were different from those which statesmen and traders had imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the wilderness, and by the wilderness itself—the circumstances which, in the new country, closed them round. ”

“ Notwithstanding their troubles with the Indians, the hardships and privations to which the first settlers of a wild country are always exposed, and the shameful neglect with which they were treated by the mother-countries, the French and English colonies went on growing and thriving in a way that was wonderful to behold. ”

“ The colonies carry out with them a knowledge of agriculture and of other useful arts, superior to what can grow up of its own accord, in the course of many centuries, among savage and barbarous nations. They carry out with them, too, the habit of subordination, some notion of the regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which support it, and of a regular administration of justice; and they naturally establish something of the same kind in the new settlement. ”

“ In this book American colonization is considered in the light of general colonization as a phase of history. Englishmen in planting colonies in America brought with them the institutions with which they had been familiar at home: it is shown what these institutions were, and how, in adapting themselves to new conditions of growth, they differed from English models. As prominent among the changed conditions, the physical geography of America and its aboriginal inhabitants receive somewhat extended treatment ”

“ In these wars the colonies formed an ideal as to the duty of a mother-country to protect daughter colonies, and aided in developing a policy which has been described by one of the most brilliant of modern writers as that of “sea power.”3 The illustration of that theory was a succession of fleet engagements in the West Indies, always followed by a picking up of enemy’s islands; and also the repeated efforts of the colonists in separate or joint expeditions to conquer the neighboring French or Spanish territory. ”

“ Even colonizing England has planted military colonies in Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Ohio, besides having temporary camps on her frontiers where towns grow up, as at Raglan and Otahuhu, in New Zealand; and the pensioner settlement of Onehunga may be taken as an image of an ancient Roman colony of veterans.
3. We seem to rise considerably in the scale as we leave behind us colonies founded on the lust of conquest, and arrive at colonies whose formation was governed by political motives. They are always more or less collective; they sometimes take place en masse ”

“ To fix upon their minds the fact that colonies were planted by different European nations, it is often advisable to purchase at a stationer's tiny adhesive stars of various colors. Each color [8] serves to represent a nation, and stars are pasted upon the spots where colonies once stood. ”

“ In this long span of mortal years, events of vast and enduring moment shook the world. A handful of scattered and dependent colonies in the northern continent of America made themselves into one of the most powerful and beneficent of states. ”

“ The Colonies adapt themselves more readily to change than the older civilisation; they represent a younger, more vigorous generation, and, if behind the mother country in many respects, are ahead of her in others of quite vital importance. ”

“ But in more modern ages, the spirit of violence being, in some measure, if the expression may be allowed, sheathed in commerce, colonies have been settled by the nations of Europe for the purposes of trade. ”

“ In this way the balance is adjusted in favour of the colonies. It is a great deal more than redressed if the superior, social, and economic conditions, under which the colonists live, are also placed in the scale. ”

“ In this complex empire of ours the problem presents itself in many shapes, and each must be studied and dealt with according to its character. There is the broad distinction between colonies and conquered countries. Colonists are part of ourselves. ”

“ If the Colonies will undertake the duties as well as the privileges of British citizens, we may go on together as members of one great Empire, each part habitually maintaining itself, and the whole ready to rally round any threatened point. ”

“ Resolved,⁠That these ^united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved
NH.—— ”

“ But since you began, the interpenetration of town and country by railroads, and the rush of emigrants to our colonies, have widened infinitely the sphere of your influence; and you are now teaching them also to live as useful men in the farthest corners of these isles, and in far lands beyond the seas, to become educated emigrants, loyal colonists; to raise, by their example, rude settlers, and ruder savages ”

“ But it is just this which has made us successful colonists, and it is the absence of this which makes French colonies dead failures. Whereas we and the Germans pour forth tens of thousands of emigrants, France sends to her North African Settlements just over six hundred persons per annum—and they are nearly all officials. ”

“ In the infancy of colonies, it has been the maxim of all governments to encourage the emigration and settlement of inhabitants from the mother-country, without paying much attention to the means by which this was to be done. ”

“ By my calculations, every three or four Englishmen who go to one of our southern colonies, and are prosperous, afford employment to one person of those remaining at home; and we thus see how immediately the mother country is benefited by an extensive colonisation. ”

“ The inclination to plant colonies in America still continued, and this being the only project in which men of adventure and enterprise could exert their qualities, in a pacifick reign, multitudes, who were discontented with their condition in their native country, and such multitudes there will always be, sought relief, or, at least, a change, in the western regions, where they settled, in the northern part of the continent, at a distance from the Spaniards, at that time almost the only nation that had any power or will to obstruct us. ”

“ The colonies founded by distinct nations, while they are alike in exhibiting specializations caused in the way above described, grow unlike in so far as they take on, more or less, the organizations of the nations they sprung from. ”

“ In riding through those portions of our states that were the early settled colonies, it is pleasant to note where any old houses are still standing, or where the sites of early colonial houses are known, the good taste usually shown by the colonists in the places chosen to build their houses. ”

“ But the fact that such things took place, affords a very simple explanation of the difficulties which had already arisen and which subsequently arose in the history of European colonization between a mother country and her colonies. Men could put two and two together in those days as in ours. If colonists saw the rulers of the ruling land treating high offices in the colony as a matter of individual profit and public indifference, they could only come to the conclusion that they had better take care of themselves ”

“ The thirteen American colonies, which in 1775 dared defy the might of Great Britain, and which in a stubborn struggle were able to win their independence, were settled at various times, and by colonists actuated by widely different motives. ”

“ At these colonies each adult, if able-bodied and willing to work, is provided with a few acres of land, a cow, a pig, and a few sheep, and the majority of the pauper colonists are made (after the first outlay) self-supporting for the rest of their days. ”

“ The other sort of colonies are for trade, and intended to increase the wealth and power of the native kingdom; which they will abundantly do if managed prudently, and put and kept under a proper regulation. ”

“ Colonies the world has known before, but neither the Greek and Phœnician colonies of the old world nor the American colonies of the eighteenth century were linked closely and abundantly enough to the mother country to prevent a final estrangement and detachment. ”

“ In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763. ”

“ Some exclaim that Americans are incapable of colonizing or of managing colonies; that there is something in our national character or institutions that wholly disqualifies us for the work. Yet the most successful colonies in the whole world were the thirteen original colonies on our Atlantic coast ”