ivil liberty.
The Bible is a book of faith, and a book of doctrine, and a book of
morals, and a book of religion, of especial revelation from God; but it
is also a book which teaches man his own individual responsibility, his
own dignity, and his equality with his fellow-man.

Bacon and Locke, and Shakspeare and Milton, also came with the
colonists. It was the object of the first settlers to form new political
systems, but all that belonged to cultivated man, to family, to
neighborhood, to social relations, accompanied them. In the Doric phrase
of one of our own historians, "they came to settle on bare creation";
but their settlement in the wilderness, nevertheless, was not a
lodgement of nomadic tribes, a mere resting-place of roaming savages. It
was the beginning of a permanent community, the fixed residence of
cultivated men. Not only was English literature read, but English, good
English, was spoken and written, before the axe had made way to let in
the sun upon the habitations and fields of Plymouth and Massachusetts.
And whatever may be said to the contrary, a correct use of the English
language is, at this day, more general throughout the United States,
than it is throughout England herself.

But another grand characteristic is, that, in the English colonies,
political affairs were left to be managed by the colonists themselves.
This is another fact wholly distinguishing them in character, as it has
distinguished them in fortune, from the colonists of Spain. Here lies
the foundation of that experience in self-government, which has
preserved order, and security, and regularity, amidst the play of
popular institutions. Home government was the secret of the prosperity
of the North American settlements. The more distinguished of the New
England colonists, with a most remarkable sagacity and a long-sighted
reach into futurity, refused to come to America unless they could bring
with them charters providing for the administration of their affairs in
this country.[5] They saw from the first the evils of being governed in
the New World by a power fixed in the Old. Acknowledging the general
superiority of the crown, they still insisted on the right of passing
local laws, and of local administration. And history teaches us the
justice and the value of this determination in the example of Virginia.
The early attempts to settle that Colony failed, sometimes with the most
melancholy and fatal consequences, from want of knowle