190 NATIONAL GROWTH AND NATIONAL CHARACTER 



durance because of infraction of often odious laws, fit for lowly 

 serfs rather than loyal subjects. Northwestern Europe had be- 

 come, indeed, a great reservoir of pent-up thought, of intellectual 

 individuality seeking natural outlet ; a part of the tense original- 

 ity held to conventional bounds through which it wrought the in- 

 tellectual renaissance marked by the immortal contemporaries, 

 Shakspeare and Bacon; but the more aberrant thought merely 

 seethed and bubbled and fomented discord throughout its reser- 

 voir. A flood-gate opened with the colonizing of America; and 

 thinkers instinctively athirst for new motives gave character to 

 the human stream flowing toward the sunset. Thus the Amer- 

 ican colonists were preeminent in that intellectual activity which 

 is the germ of intellectual freedom. Others might lie supine in 

 stocks and shackles of intellectual subjection, but not this in" 

 tellectually prepotent people; and it was but natural that they 

 should be the first to finally rend the fetters of mental serfdom. 

 Such was the stock, and such were the characteristics, of the 

 American colonists who gathered from meager settlements scat- 

 tered over a thousand miles of Atlantic coast to sign the American 

 Declaration of Independence. They were not representatives of 

 a nation, for there was no nation ; they were simply strong men 

 forced together by a common impulse toward freedom and 

 equality. No other men bound to fatherland by blood and bone 

 were ever put to so severe a test of moral strength ; no weaker 

 men would have risked the fatal chance; no earlier men in the 

 history of the world possessed the profound physical and moral 

 confidence required to consciously cast aside the lessons of his- 

 tory, to deliberately overthrow established conventions, and to 

 calmly face the necessity of erecting a new national theory on a 

 new plane of thought. The step was not one to be taken by 

 weaklings ; it could have been taken by no other living men 

 than those chosen representatives of colonists whose veins carried 

 the blood of the strongest peoples of the earth for uncounted 

 generations, and whose brains throbbed with a heritage of vigor 

 summing the intellectual progress of the world. 



The issue of the Declaration introduced a new factor into the 

 lives of the colonists — a factor equally efficient in war and in 

 peace, a factor that no subject of kings can comprehend, a factor 

 indeed that some free citizens have half forgotten : The ancestral 

 tribes of the Briton in Europe and America were led and guided 

 by personally-beloved patriarchs and priests, half-worshipped 



