ommon stock for the good of all, and the balance of
relative rights and claims can be habitually and peaceably adjusted. It
would be difficult in the case of any other pair of nations, to present
an assemblage of traits at once so common and so distinctive, as has
been given in this probably imperfect enumeration.

There were, however, the strongest reasons why America could not grow
into a reflection or repetition of England. Passing from a narrow island
to a continent almost without bounds, the colonists at once and vitally
altered their conditions of thought as well as of existence, in relation
to the most important and most operative of all social facts, the
possession of the soil. In England, inequality lies embedded in the very
base of the social structure; in America it is a late, incidental,
unrecognized product, not of tradition, but of industry and wealth, as
they advance with various and, of necessity, unequal steps. Heredity,
seated as an idea in the heart's core of Englishmen, and sustaining far
more than it is sustained by those of our institutions which express it,
was as truly absent from the intellectual and moral store, with which
the colonists traversed the Atlantic, as if it had been some forgotten
article in the bills of lading that made up their cargoes. Equality
combined with liberty, and renewable at each descent from one
generation to another, like a lease with stipulated breaks, was the
groundwork of their social creed. In vain was it sought, by arrangements
such as those connected with the name of Baltimore or of Penn, to
qualify the action of those overpowering forces which so determined the
case. Slavery itself, strange as it now may seem, failed to impair the
theory however it may have imported into the practice a hideous
solecism. No hardier republicanism was generated in New England than in
the Slave States of the South, which produced so many of the great
statesmen of America.

It may be said that the North, and not the South, had the larger number
of colonists; and was the centre of those commanding moral influences
which gave to the country as a whole its political and moral atmosphere.
The type and form of manhood for America was supplied neither by the
Recusant in Maryland, nor by the Cavalier in Virginia, but by the
Puritan of New England; and it would have been a form and type widely
different could the colonization have taken place a couple of centuries,
or a single century, soon