TENURE OF LANDS. 19 



of every people where it has prevailed. But I need not have 

 gone beyond our own country to find illustrations of this as a 

 moral and political axiom. As an offshoot from the mother 

 country, the people at the North, at least, brought with tliem 

 English notions as they did their language, and planted them 

 here to grow up with the colonies. In one respect, however, 

 there was an important difference between the people of New 

 and Old England. While the colonists clung, as for their lives, 

 to the Magna Charta and the great elements of personal freedom 

 and security which were found in the British constitution, 

 while they cherished with fondness and pride the memories and 

 historic associations which clustered around the old home- 

 stead, they had come, themselves, from the intelligent middle 

 classes, and had not been accustomed to share in the ownership 

 of large estates in lands, and were content, under the demo- 

 cratic training to which their religious notions and educations 

 had led, with such portions of the new territory of which they 

 found themselves the masters, as they could personally cultivate 

 and manage. In other words, without perhaps knowing the 

 name which could best describe their social condition as colo- 

 nists, they constituted as pure a democracy as can well consist 

 with wise laws, public quiet and individual security. This, too, 

 was substantially the condition of the Southern colonies, with 

 such differences as grew out of their ideas of church polity, and 

 the forms of their governments prescribed in their respective 

 colonial charters, as well as the nature of their associations 

 before leaving the mother country. This state things contiiuied 

 until the Revolution ; although as showing the radical differ- 

 ence which had even then grown up between the two sections 

 in matters of opinion, it is said that during the Revolution there 

 were hardly patriots enough among the people of the South to 

 keep the loyalists in check who still clung to their fealty to the 

 crown. 



The leading spirits, however, both South and North, not only 

 went hand in hand through that struggle, but in the no less 

 important crisis which gave the country peace, prosperity and 

 power, by the adoption of the Federal Constitution. It was the 

 result of a generous sacrifice of local prejudices on all sides, and 

 a compromise of conflicting interests and opinions, and it found 

 no abler or more devoted advocates than men bred under and 



