however, certain features in common, and
they were all placed in an analogous situation. The tie of language is
perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind. All
the emigrants spoke the same tongue; they were all offsets from the same
people. Born in a country which had been agitated for centuries by the
struggles of faction, and in which all parties had been obliged in
their turn to place themselves under the protection of the laws, their
political education had been perfected in this rude school, and they
were more conversant with the notions of right and the principles of
true freedom than the greater part of their European contemporaries. At
the period of their first emigrations the parish system, that fruitful
germ of free institutions, was deeply rooted in the habits of the
English; and with it the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people had
been introduced into the bosom of the monarchy of the House of Tudor.

The religious quarrels which have agitated the Christian world were then
rife. England had plunged into the new order of things with headlong
vehemence. The character of its inhabitants, which had always been
sedate and reflective, became argumentative and austere. General
information had been increased by intellectual debate, and the mind
had received a deeper cultivation. Whilst religion was the topic of
discussion, the morals of the people were reformed. All these national
features are more or less discoverable in the physiognomy of those
adventurers who came to seek a new home on the opposite shores of the
Atlantic.

Another remark, to which we shall hereafter have occasion to recur, is
applicable not only to the English, but to the French, the Spaniards,
and all the Europeans who successively established themselves in the New
World. All these European colonies contained the elements, if not the
development, of a complete democracy. Two causes led to this result. It
may safely be advanced, that on leaving the mother-country the emigrants
had in general no notion of superiority over one another. The happy and
the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of
equality among men than poverty and misfortune. It happened, however,
on several occasions, that persons of rank were driven to America
by political and religious quarrels. Laws were made to establish a
gradation of ranks; but it was soon found that the soil of America was
opposed to a territorial aristoc