civilisation, industry, and trade in the more austere, if not less money-loving, community of Massachusetts? In 1763, it is computed to have numbered 241,000 persons, of whom 5,200 were slaves, as against Connecticut, with 145,000 and 4,500 slaves, and Rhode Island, with 40,000 and 4,600 slaves. The population of New Hampshire, at this period, says Grahame, had not been distinctly ascertained; but in 1762 it was estimated at 52,700, though all these tables are vague, and the general calculation

that the people of New England, in the mass, numbered about half a million, is probably an approach to the truth. There exists a reason for the uncertainty of our information upon these points. The New Englanders delighted in the extraordinary development of their population, yet were jealous of giving publicity to their statistics. An obvious cause of this feeling was, that as the Jews of the Middle Ages concealed their money-bags to save themselves from extortion, so the acute and thrifty colonists of the Northeastern States blinked the fact of their rapidlyincreasing numbers in order not to bring down upon themselves additional taxes. In 1763, when the Government at home were already dreaming of an Imperial revenue to be derived from the resources of the New World, a complete Census was directed, in Massachusetts especially. It was resented as an encroachment upon the social liberty of the province, and many specious arguments were employed to justify a determined resistance to it in every township and parish. The Puritans came to the aid of the patriots. Preachers stood up in the pulpit to set forth the religious grounds upon which the idea of a Census should be repelled; quoted texts relating to King David's punishment for his unhallowed attempt to number the people of Israel; and expatiated largely upon the passages" And God was displeased with this thing, therefore he smote Israel; Is it not I that commanded the people to be numbered?" -upon that relating to the penalty, "Either three years' famine; or three months to be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the Lord, even the pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the Lord destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel,"—and upon the consummation, "So the Lord sent pestilence upon Israel; and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men." These citations from the Second Book of Chronicles were read far and wide in the pulpits of New England; the Census was delayed from year to year, and, when ultimately undertaken, in consequence of a peremptory mandate from Whitehall, was so negligently carried out that it never possessed any historical value.

We have here a very singular reflection of the religious opinions of that epoch, in a part of the world where Puritan feeling attained its utmost exaltation. The New Englanders of the year 1764 were not, however, a majority of professed Puritans, though, in popular usage and sentiment, and even in their provincial jurispru dence, they clung to much of that which had been

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ordained by their forefathers of the Mayflower. The ground-swell of the storm against Cavalier licence still rose almost as high, among these stern censors of manners, as when the sumptuary laws, and the ordinances against flowing curls, patches, powder, and lace, were enacted. The Government of Connecticut revived a decree which for some time had been considered obsolete, condemning idleness, the unseasonable assemblage of young people, tavern-haunting, and tale-bearing; while that of Massachusetts, quite in opposition to the axiom of Shakespeare's Henry VIII., who says to Anne Bullen, "I were unmannerly to take you out, and not to kiss you," put in execution a statute, dated so far back as 1646, denouncing the punishment of flogging against any man bestowing the salute of a kiss on a woman in the streets," whether with her consent or without it. It is said that this law was actually put in force, in a singular way, more than a century after its enactment. The captain of a British man-of-war, cruising off the coast of Massachusetts for the protection of its trade during the great maritime conflict with France, returned from an excursion, on a Sunday, to Boston, where his wife was staying. The story is related by Burnaby, and may be repeated on his authority. "Learning his arrival, this lady rushed down to the harbour to meet him; and, in a transport of joy, they could not refrain from tenderly embracing each other in the open streets. For this breach of the laws, and desecration of the Sabbath, the captain was summoned to appear before the magistrates, who, after a grave rebuke, sentencesi him to be publicly flogged. The punishment is said to have inferred no ignominy whatever; and, after having undergone it, he was admitted freely into the best company of the place, and even into the society of the magistrates, who so little guessed the resentment which he nourished in his bosom as to accept an invitation to an entertainment on board his vessel, on the day when she was to leave the station, and sail for England. After regaling them with a handsome feast, he caused his sailors to flog them all on the deck of the vessel in sight of the town; and then, telling them that he and they had cleared all accounts, he dismissed them, and set sail." The truth of the narrative was believed in at the time, though the details varied in different accounts, and in the reminiscences, for years after, of the people of the Massachusetts metropolis.*

It is only fair to add, however, that in many quarters this story is considered at the best apocryphal, and the authority of Burnaby, who merely visited the country, and was perhaps hoaxed, very questionable.

This extreme strictness, together with the weight of taxes imposed by extraordinary military efforts, explained the desertion of so many Massachusetts and Connecticut colonists for the less inflexibly ruled and less heavily - burdened territories of Nova Scotia, New York, and Canada. The asceticism of Boston, indeed, in the earlier period of its history, is declared to have seriously retarded its growth; but there were not a few who defied the more rigorous of its social regulations, and took their pleasures freely in the neighbouring woodlands. It is needless, perhaps, to remind ourselves that this asperity of manners, which was a reaction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, led, as if logically, to another, which nevertheless has never broken out in any scandalous public excesses. The American mind, and particularly that of the New England States, was, in the transition time now being reviewed, intensely occupied with politics, and with the future destinies of the whole British dominion in the New World. Two grand causes of anxiety, no doubt, had been removed. The French were conquered, and no longer rivals; the Indians were subdued, and, though in a certain sense still enemies, did not darken the frontiers of the white settlements with a perpetual terror. Nevertheless, the red man persisted in cherishing his hereditary, or rather, perhaps, natural hatred of the interlopers upon his hunting - grounds, and his villages continued to be the encampments of resentment, discontent, and meditated vengeance. But there was no longer, as there had been for years, in New Hampshire, among other territories, the necessity of an incessant watch and garrisoning along the borders; for the savage had lost his powerful ally, and could expect no further supplies of arms and ammunition, and ammunition, or bribes of ardent liquors and money, from Europe. He had given up the prisoners hitherto languishing under a cruel captivity in his wigwams; only a few were not permitted to return to the civilised districts; and of these, in all likelihood, not many survived the Peace of Paris. But the evidences of what had been, remained-the villages clustered round their little churches, with the second storeys of the houses overhanging the first, so that the Indians might be fired upon with advantage while they were hewing with their tomahawks at the doors; the hamlets and farms which had acquired strange names from having been the scenes of fearful tragic events; the single plankbridge over Bloody Brook; and other signs of memories never to be blotted out from among the descendants of those who pitched their tents round the spot famous for all time in American annals as

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Burial Hill. The fears of the Borderers, however, had now subsided, and they once more commenced establishing new footholds in the wilderness among the violet-perfumed forests, the blueberry plains, the lakes so long swarming with hostile canoes, and the hills that had been used as the fortresses of native nations.

Relieved from this traditionary dread, New Hampshire saw its boundaries expanding, and its people multiplying; emigrants pouring in upon its frontiers from the other States of New England; and the territory called the Green Mountain, or, in French, Vermont, so thickening with population that the jealousies of New York were aroused. Both New York and New Hampshire claimed it, and the authority of the former might have been accepted, without any great pressure being exercised, had it not been for that great moving cause of American revolution,―resistance to taxation. This was sought to be imposed in the shape of fines and quit-rents so heavy that the lately-arrived settlers, headed by two enthusiastic and daring leaders, Ethan Allen and Seth Warner, natives of Connecticut, spurned the financial mandates, and defied, with arms in their hands, the collectors of the Middle State. They were denounced as outlaws; the sentence was promulgated in vain. They were threatened with tremendous pains and penalties; their opposition only became the more flagrant. When Ethan Allen was urged by the King's attorney at New York to abandon his resistance to the Royal claims, because he had not the power to make it good, he answered, "The gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills." It appears singular at this time that, upon a continent so vast as to allow of an almost boundless occupation of territory, the title-deeds to land were so violently contested; but, in the absence of great roads, not to speak of railways, the Atlantic States, as being nearest to Europe, and of course best situated for purposes of commerce, were at an early date comparatively crowded. The territory of Wyoming, celebrated by the poet Campbell in his Indian poem, was originally purchased by a company of Connecticut planters from the great Confederation of the Six Nations; but, owing to the wars with France and with the Red Indians, its settlement was for many years postponed. In 1763, however, its colonisation took place, and Campbell has vividly depicted the grief of the red race when this favourite resort of their forefathers was lost to them, although they themselves had sold it. It was hither that a new emigration was drawn from Europe-an emigration of men who, having acquired a larger knowledge of the New World, longed for

its freedom, the abundance of its soil, and its innumerable novelties of existence. Many were military officers, who laid down the sword to cultivate rice, corn, and sweet-potatoes in the Valley of the Susquehannah; and their transformation from soldiers into husbandmen and patriarchs is rather more poetically than historically described in the English epic. They became entangled in a bitter, albeit prosaic, litigation (between the Government of Connecticut on the one hand, and the proprietaries of Pennsylvania on the other) on the everlasting question of land-rights; and these two parties to a single claim contested their point, foot by foot, with no less pertinacity than the Royal Governors of New York and New Hampshire had exhibited in their pretensions to the glades of Vermont. All were animated by a keen desire to augment their revenues by multiplying fees upon the sale and transfer of lands which they had often obtained at next to nominal prices from its aboriginal and probably autochthonal possessors. Charters in those days were invariably vague, and it was found much easier to sell a sovereignty than prove a title to it.

But we

It was necessary to offer this somewhat mechanical sketch of affairs as they then existed with respect to the lordship of the American territory, because they formed the spring of events to come, terrible in their magnitude, enthralling in their interest, and leading to results that surpassed the most far-reaching vision even of that adventurous generation. may now turn to another and a more attractive section of the picture. The whale-fisheries of the St. Lawrence, undetected by the French, had been discovered by the daring of the English; the pursuit of this strange and dangerous industry became a characteristic of New England colonial enterprise; and in the year 1763 no fewer than eighty New England ships-increased, since 1761, from a total of ten-were engaged in the most exciting and, when successful, the most remunerative of all fisheries. It is essential to the previous and future history of the United States that, at this point, a sketch should be presented of their religious colour and attitude in the period previous to that in which the great revolutionary disturbance began. In New England, about the date of 1764, there were nearly six hundred Congregational thurches, in addition to ecclesiastical associa

tions formed after the model of the Church of England as it then existed, which had of late considerably extended their influence through all the colonies, or States. The first-born piety of the young States had certainly dwindled; yet it survived in a deep degree, and would probably have

been still stronger, had it known how to harmonise itself with modern ideas. Opinion and sentiment, no doubt, constitute the main elements of history; yet, in drawing a picture of Europeanised America in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there are many considerations to be kept in view. A most striking contrast was exhibited between the religious history of the English colonies, and that of the Spanish possessions. In the case of the latter, a political and ecclesiastical despotism settled down at once upon the land, rendering the people unfit to govern themselves, and incapable of a steady obedience to any one else. The immense power of Spain, and the concentrated interest of the nation in its colonies, felt alike by the King and the populace, gave a marvellous impetus to the peopling of their new possessions in the New World. Cities arose, rich, magnificent, for a time teeming with inhabitants, and prosperous with trade. Splendour and riches surrounded the proprietors of lands that bloomed with all the productions of an exuberant soil and a generous climate. Convents, churches, and palaces were built, which rivalled, if they did not eclipse, those of Spain herself. And it seemed, once, as if the Spanish dominion would before long extend from Cape Horn to the North Pole, and confer upon Madrid an overwhelming supremacy, not only over America, but over the world. Yet this showy magnificence was not destined to last, containing, as it did, the causes of an early and rapid decline. In comparison with it, the progress of the British colonies stands splendidly conspicuous. Their early struggles and local conflicts were not submitted to or undertaken for expansion of power, or the multiplication of riches.

The English settlers landed on a dismal shore, to brave the inclemencies of an inhospitable climate, which was for them not more cruel than the enemies they had to encounter upon every field and in every forest. They had to wring from a niggard soil a scanty subsistence, and to win a narrow footing for the most humble of homes, not only without the aid, but almost in direct opposition to the wishes, of their native country. But they brought with them the habit of self-government, and the political traditions of the English race.

Happily for America in some respects, the sove reign mind of England took little interest in the fortunes of the colonies, and therefore did not, at the outset, interfere with the settlements formed by our countrymen. by our countrymen. The reigning sentiments in England, however, naturally put their stamp and impress on the institutions which were in course of being formed. The character of Englishmen de