was regarded only as spoil. The tone of
moral feeling was lowered everywhere, for the nations were crazed with
the hope of sudden accumulations. Spain became enervated and
demoralized.

On America itself the demoralization was even more marked. There never
was such a state of moral degradation in any Christian country as in
South America. Three centuries have passed, and the low state of morals
continues. Contrast Mexico and Peru with the United States, morally and
intellectually. What seeds of vice did not the Spaniards plant! How the
old natives melted away!

And then, to add to the moral evils attending colonization, was the
introduction of African slaves, especially in the West Indies and the
Southern States of North America. Christendom seems to have lost the
sense of morality. Slavery more than counterbalances all other
advantages together. It was the stain of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Not merely slaves, but the slave-trade, increase the horrors
of the frightful picture. America became associated, in the minds of
Europeans, with gold-hunting, slavery, and cruelty to Indians. Better
that the country had remained undiscovered than that such vices and
miseries should be introduced into the most fertile parts of the
New World.

I cannot see that civilization gained anything, morally, by the
discovery of America, until the new settlers were animated by other
motives than a desire for sudden wealth. When the country became
colonized by men who sought liberty to worship God,--men of lofty
purposes, willing to undergo sufferings and danger in order to plant the
seeds of a higher civilization,--then there arose new forms of social
and political life. Such men were those who colonized New England. And,
say what you will, in spite of all the disagreeable sides of the Puritan
character, it was the Puritans who gave a new impulse to civilization in
its higher sense. They founded schools and colleges and churches. They
introduced a new form of political life by their town-meetings, in which
liberty was nurtured, and all local improvements were regulated. It was
the autonomy of towns on which the political structure of New England
rested. In them was born that true representative government which has
gradually spread towards the West. The colonies were embryo
States,--States afterwards to be bound together by a stronger tie than
that of a league. The New England States, after the war of Independence,
were th