Paris to be
proclaimed the incomparable benefactor of mankind! Provincial! But was
this man provincial? Or was that, indeed, a province which produced such
men? Was that country rightly dependent and inferior where law and
custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In
that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual
revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a
kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast
with Europe, so "artificial," so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies
and useless inequalities, so encumbered with decayed superstitions and
the debris of worn-out institutions, how superior was this new land of
promise where the citizen was a free man, where the necessities of life
were the sure reward of industry, where manners were simple, where vice
was less prevalent than virtue and native incapacity the only effective
barrier to ambition! In those years when British statesmen were
endeavoring to reduce the "plantations" to a stricter obedience, some
quickening influence from this ideal of Old World philosophers came to
reinforce the determination of Americans to be masters of their own
destiny.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the constitutional and political tendencies in this period, see
Charming, _History of the United States_, II, chaps, X-XII; Greene,
_Provincial America_, chaps, V, XII; Andrews, _The Colonial
Period_, chap. VII. Economic, social, and intellectual
characteristics are well described in Channing, II, chaps, XV-XVII;
Greene, chaps, XVI-XVIII; Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chaps,
III, IV. The best account of religious changes in the eighteenth
century is in Walker, _History of Congregationalism in America._
See also, Fiske, _New France and New England_, chap. VI. Of special
importance for the influence of Princeton College and for the
religious conditions in the up-country are _The Life of Devereaux
Jarrett_ (Baltimore, 1806); and Alexander, _Biographical Sketches
of the Founder and the Alumni of Log College_ (Princeton, 1845).
The expansion of population into the interior and the coming of the
Germans and Scotch-Irish are well described in Channing, II, chap,
XIV; and Greene, chap. XIV. For a full treatment of the German
migration see Faust, _The German Element in the United States_ (2
vols. 1909); for the Scotch-Irish