public utility, for they tended to prevent the improvement and well
peopling of the colonies! And what must we think of those
merchants, who, for the sake of a little paltry gain, will be
concerned in importing and disposing of these abominable cargoes?'

With these quotations I would leave the subject to the consideration of
every unprejudiced judgment. Is it not for the Southerner, even for the
Virginian, to produce further evidence of his Cavalier descent before it
can be allowed? We see abundant proofs, taken from authorities in no way
connected with the present inimical feelings of the North and South,
that a very large portion of the English colonists consisted of
transported felons. To this direct evidence--which can only be rebutted
by evidence of the extinction of the descendants of this class and the
infusion of an equal amount of gentle blood--we have thus far only the
fact of the presence of a very few good families, and the boasts of
prejudiced partisans.

And now, after having indicated the grounds for a careful criticism of
Southern claims, let me assert the claims of New England, not to gentle
blood, but to a purely English ancestry. Here we come at once upon solid
ground, and the authorities are numerous and trustworthy. Genealogy has,
for the past ten or twelve years, been a favorite study in New England;
and, as Sir Bernard Burke writes, 'for ten or twelve years before the
civil conflict broke out ... Massachusetts was more genealogical than
Yorkshire, and Boston sustained what London never did, a magazine
devoted exclusively to genealogy.' The history of different families,
the records of nearly all the older towns, the colonial records, have
all been placed in print. Many of these books are larger than any
English works on the subject, and are monuments of patient industry.
After such researches we may claim to speak intelligently of our
ancestry, and to point to the proofs of our assertions. In one work,
contained in four volumes, covering two thousand five hundred pages, Mr.
Savage has attempted to record the names of the settlers of New England
and of two generations of their descendants. Imperfect as such an
attempt may be, what other section of our country or any nation can
pretend to such a knowledge of its antecedents? I give the result of his
twenty years' study in his own words:

'From long and careful research I have judged the proportion of the
whole numbe