med that he was the author of it.
He himself used to assert, that the scheme of a limited and
decentralized government was produced by the events which caused the
settlement of the country and the subsequent union of the colonies.
The emigration to America was stimulated by the great Protestant and
Catholic dispute which occupied Europe nearly two centuries, and
during which time the original thirteen colonies were founded. The
sentiment of religious freedom was the active principle of all the
alliances, wars, intrigues, and adventures of that stormy period.
The rights of conscience were maintained, in defiance of the rack and
the stake. They were stubbornly asserted in regard to the smallest
matters. Lines of separation, so fine as hardly to be perceptible,
were defended to the last. The Catholic was not more irreconcilably
opposed to the Protestant, than the Lutheran to the Quaker, or the
Puritan to the Baptist. Men who differed merely about the meaning of
a single passage of Scripture thought each other unfit to sit at the
same table. The immigrants were exiles. By the conditions under
which they acted, as being from the defeated party, and as being
among those whom defeat did not subdue, they must have had the
enthusiasm of their time in its most earnest form. Each man came
here intent upon his right to worship God in his own way. _That_ he
could never forget. It had been impressed upon him by everything which
can affect the understanding or touch the heart of man,--by the memory
of success and defeat,--by his own sufferings and the martyrdom of
his brethren,--by Bunyan's fable and by Milton's song.

But they did not lack bigotry. They were as ready to persecute those
who differed with them here as they had been at home. The last and
greatest social truth, that the surest way of protecting our own
liberties is by respecting those of others, was forced upon the
colonists. So general had been the stimulants to emigration, that
every European sect and party was represented in America. Hither
came Calvinists and Lutherans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Conformists
and Non-Conformists, the precise Quaker and the elegant Huguenot,
those who fled from the tyranny of Louis and those who fled from the
tyranny of Charles, worshippers of the Virgin and men who believed
that to kneel before a crucifix was as idolatrous as to kneel before
the seven-headed idols of Hindostan. These sects and parties were so
equally balanced that tol