perhaps more properly at Fort Orange.
They sought to plant a commercial empire, and they did not fail; but in
New York now, although they celebrate the memories and virtues of
fatherland, there is no day dedicated to the colonization of New York by
the original settlers, the immigrants from Holland. I have visited
Wilmington, on Christina Creek, in Delaware, where a colony was planted
by the Swedes, about the time of the settlement of Plymouth, and though
the old church built by the colonists still stands there, I learned that
there did not remain in the whole State a family capable of speaking the
language, or conscious of bearing the name of one of the thirty-one
original colonists.

I have stood on the spot where a treaty was made by William Penn with
the aborigines of Pennsylvania, where a seat of empire was established
by him, and, although the statue of the good man stands in public
places, and his memory remains in the minds of men, yet there is no day
set apart for the recollection of the time and occasion when civil and
religious liberty were planted in that State. I went still farther
south, and descending the James River, sought the first colony of
Virginia at Jamestown. There remains nothing but the broken, ruined
tower of a poor church built of brick, in which Pocahontas was married,
and over the ruins of which the ivy now creeps. Not a human being, bond
or free, is to be seen within a mile from the spot, nor a town or city
as numerously populated as Plymouth, on the whole shores of the broad,
beautiful, majestic river, between Richmond at the head, and Norfolk,
where arms and the government have established fortifications. Nowhere
else in America, then, was there left a remembrance by the descendants
of the founders of colonies, of the virtues, the sufferings, the
bravery, the fidelity to truth and freedom of their ancestors; and more
painful still, nowhere in Europe can be found an acknowledgment or even
a memory of these colonists. In Holland, in Spain, in Great Britain, in
France, nowhere is there to be found any remembrance of the men they
sent out to plant liberty on this continent. So on the way to the
Mississippi, I saw where De Soto planted the standard of Spain, and, in
imagination at least, I followed the march of Cortez in Mexico, and
Pizarro in Peru; but their memory has gone out. Civil liberty perishes,
and religious liberty was never known in South America; nor does Spain,
any more than othe