MR. GUSHING S ADDRESS, 9 



such as to this day exist nowhere else in America. It needs 

 only to compare Avhat Spain did in America in the sixteenth 

 century with Avhat England did in the seventeenth, and to 

 cojitrast the condition of Spanish America in the year 1600, 

 v/ith that of British America in the year 1700, to dispel the 

 common delusion among us, which, from partial views and a 

 pardonable national vanity, assumes our superior and peculiar 

 intrinsic aptitude for colonization and for em.pire. 



Whoever examines carefully the history and condition of the 

 Western and Northwestern States, and sees how, at a time 

 when the English still timidly clung to the Atlantic sea-coast, 

 and, owing to their repellent qualities of race, were perpetual- 

 ly at war with the Indians, at that very time the French, on 

 the other hand, had implanted their ideas, their authority, their 

 language, and their religion, among the numerous and pow- 

 erful tribes of the West, from Canada all around to Louisiana, — 

 whoever, I say, considers this, will be inclined to think, that it 

 was not any particular line of policy, nor any wide-reaching 

 ideas, nor any intrinsic superiority of blood, on the part of the 

 Colonies themselves, but the contingencies of a war in Eu- 

 rope, which decided the question, whether the predominant in- 

 fluences in North America should be English or French, Teu- 

 tonic or Celtic. 



We, in New-England, have been accustomed to take a still 

 more contracted view of the question, and to over-estimate the 

 influence exercised by the peculiar ideas of the Puritans in the 

 colonization of America : unjust in this to the Hollanders of 

 New-York, to the Huguenots of Carolina, to the Catholics of 

 Maryland, to the Cavaliers of Virginia, and to the Irish in all 

 parts of the United States. That religion was not the pivot- 

 al fact in the successful colonization of the United States may 

 be plainly seen by the rapid growth, in our day, of the Austra- 

 lian Colonies, which, though unable to boast of any exemplary 

 purity in religion or morality, have yet advanced faster in 

 population and production than did the Anglo-American Colo- 

 nies. 



What, then, is the explanation of the rise, greatness, wealth, 

 prosperity, freedom, and stability, of the United States ? I have 



