Colonists

“ Its benevolent purposes are not confined to the limits of one continent—not to the prosperity of a solitary race. They embrace the largest two portions of the earth, with the peace and happiness of both descriptions of their present inhabitants, and the countless millions of their posterity. The colonists, reared in the bosom of this republic, with a knowledge of the blessings which liberty imparts, although now unable to share them, will carry a recollection of them to benighted Africa, and light up, in time, her immense territory. ”

“ We can imagine hardy colonists penetrating into this encircling belt of unknown and uncivilized regions, obtaining a mastery over the aborigines wherever they went, establishing some isolated settlements on the banks of fertile rivers, and presenting to the astonished barbarians some of the results of civilized administration and civilized life. ”

“ Neither he nor any one else in England could then have guessed that in less than two centuries the narrow fringe of colonists would have spread from shore to shore, thus carpeting a continent with a new people. ”

“ We send out colonies of the limbs, without the belly and the head, of needy persons, many of them mere paupers, or even criminals; colonies made up of a single class of persons in the community, and that the most helpless and the most unfit to perpetuate our national character, and to become the fathers of a race whose habits of thinking and feeling shall correspond to those which, in the meantime, we are cherishing at home. The ancients, on the contrary, sent out a representation of the parent State—colonists from all ranks. ”

“ The colonists now regained the post which had at first been seized, and instantly brought the long-nine to bear upon the mass of the enemy; eight hundred men were in a solid body, and every shot literally spent itself among them. ”

“ The colonists were exceedingly perplexed to know what to do in these emergencies. The whole wilderness of North America was filled with savages. If they commenced a general war, it was impossible to predict how far its ravages might extend. The colonists were eminently men of peace. They wished to build houses, and cultivate fields, and surround their homes with the comforts and the opulence of a high civilization. They had bought their lands of the Indians fairly, and had paid for them all that the lands then were worth. ”

“ I do not admit, sir, that the analogy to which the gentleman refers us, is just, or that the cases are at all similar. There is no resemblance between the cases upon which a statesman can found an argument. The original North American colonists either fled from Europe, like our New England ancestors, to avoid persecution, or came hither at their own charges, and often at the ruin of their fortunes, as private adventurers. ”

“ As a rule, however, the colonists were men and women of small means at home. The notable thing is that they bring with them a certain old civilization, a unity of simplicity of life with real refinement, courtesy, politeness, good-humor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the contrary, the English and French have distinguished themselves always, and all the world over, as colonists; so that, saving those States of North America which have received the native names of the great lakes and rivers, we can discover exactly which were colonized by the one nation and which by the other. ”

“ For two centuries we furnished them with black servants whom we purchased on the African coast and carried over and sold there, making our own profits out of the trade, and the colonists prospered themselves and poured wealth and strength into the empire of which they were then an integral part. ”

“ The island colony proved valuable as a supply and repair station for traders and explorers, and thus served as a nucleus of both French and English settlement in America.
It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that, at any time in the world's history, enlightened folk should have thought good colonists could be made out of the sweepings of the jails and gutters of the Old World. ”

“ They alone, amidst the hordes of gold-greedy colonists who scoured the country in search of mines and slaves, established humane relations with the Indians, learned their language, studied their records, and while bringing them into schools to teach them Christianity, learned from them all that could be discovered concerning their own religion, history, and traditions. ”

“ As the spring of 1644 opened, the few surviving colonists were in absolute despair. They could not even turn their cows and oxen into the fields to nibble wild grass with the reasonable hope of ever seeing them alive again. ”

“ The reason was that the French relations to the Indians were more human than those of the English. No doubt, among the English colonists were Quakers and Moravians, whose tenets bade them deal gently with the people of the soil; and on the New York frontier, from Dutch times, there had been friendship, sometimes warmer sometimes cooler, between the Dutch and the English colonists on the one hand, and the Iroquois on the other. But the ordinary English colonist's view of the red man was the Old Testament view—hard, exclusive, and often cruel. ”

“ At present nearly all here are Colonists, transplanted, but their affections deeply rooted in the old Home life they have left. In a few years their children will be Colonials, loyal, no doubt, to the idea of their old Mother Country, and to some extent interested in what they hear or read about it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But even those possessed of every qualification for making first-class colonists, will at first meet with much to surprise and annoy them, and will need all the energy they possess, to enable them to overcome the many disagreeables which encounter them as soon as they arrive. ”

“ The first colonists sent out, being chiefly of the Society of Friends, with the predominating characteristics of their people, temperance, industry, and economy, and conducting themselves in the difficulties and hardships of their new situation with much prudence and circumspection, avoided most of the dangers to which a new colony is usually subject, and received with demonstrations of satisfaction the new settlers who arrived at New Castle October 24, 1682. ”

“ The document shows the determination of the colonists to occupy a highly commendable position among the nations of the earth. We have no sympathy with the motives which induced the purchase of the colony; and we have little with the despondency that drove our brethren from our shores. ”

“ Slow though the building of the edifice may be,—and so has been the growth of every empire under heaven,—let it be sure, and let it be strong. No man will inquire, a century hence, how many colonists were carried out in any given twelve-mouth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only, as colonization spread in the long course of years, the dwellers in one province came into contact with the dwellers in another, and both the one and the other came face to face with the French advance. Then the pressure of common danger made for union, and the race instinct gathered strength. The mother country sent out soldiers; colonists were enlisted in royal regiments to supplement the provincial militias; and in clumsy, most imperfect fashion, the English in North America began to shape themselves into a nation. ”

“ Between them and the inhabitants of the Colonies we see a great distinction. There may be in this body individuals infected with the worst vices of the colonial character. But there are also among them many gentlemen of benevolent feelings and enlarged minds, who have done much to 327alleviate the condition of their slaves, and who would willingly see the meliorating measures which his Majesty’s ministers have suggested, adopted by the West Indian legislators. They have scarcely any thing in common with the Colonists, or with the scribblers whom the Colonists feed and clothe. ”

“ Soon after its establishment, the colony narrowly escaped a bloody extirpation, and was the cause of a murderous warfare in which several of the colonists and a large number of the natives were slain. The steady growth of the colony excited the jealousy and alarm of some of the neighboring tribes ”

“ The trustees perceived at last that men who had failed at home were not likely to be successful as colonists, and they sent over a party of Scotch Highlanders and yet more German Protestants. The colony now proved a success. ”

“ All land, timber, minerals, and the like, would be rented to the Colonists, all unearned increments, and improvements on the land, would be held on behalf of the entire community, and utilised for its general advantages, a certain percentage being set apart for the extension of its borders, and the continued transmission of Colonists from England in increasing numbers. ”

“ Most of the early colonists of all classes were too busy in fighting Indians and raising the means of living to concern themselves with the relatives left in England. This indifference was not uncommon among us, and was in those early days to be expected. ”

“ At the present day most colonists go to fairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home by steamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundant provender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country. ”

“ In order to form an idea of the natural rights of the colonists, I presume it will be granted that they are men, the common children of the same Creator with their brethren of Great Britain. Nature has placed all such in a state of equality and perfect freedom to act within the bounds of the laws of nature and reason without consulting the will or regarding the humor, the passions, or whims of any other man, unless they are formed into a society or body politic. ”

“ The colonists had no one vulnerable capital; they were dispersed over a great country, with a limitless wilderness behind it, and so they had great powers of resistance. They had learnt their tactics largely from the Indians; they could fight well in open order, and harry and destroy troops in movement. ”

“ While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well as their political problems. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ They do well enough as eleventh-hour assistants, when the strong men have felled the forest and broken the ground and built houses and shops for these weaker but still useful brothers; but the first colonists must be of sterner stuff. ”

“ England Led the Way by Establishing a Colony at Sierra Leone to Provide a Home for Negroes Carried from the United States during the Revolutionary War — The Enterprise Saved by the Sturdy Maroons — Origin of the American Society for Colonizing Free People of Color — Life of the Colonists at Cape Mesurado — The Nation of Liberia Organized — An Ape of Philanthropy. ”

“ In the wilderness they had learned independence and self-reliance. They were the sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy and timourous people did not cross the ocean in those days. The American [330] colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing space which had made their lives in the old country so very unhappy. They meant to be their own masters. This the ruling classes of England did not seem to understand. The government annoyed the colonists and the colonists, who hated to be bothered in this way, began to annoy the British government. ”