to the wealth, the power, the true renown of England, exceeded anything which hitherto had marked the mutual relations of a parent State with a colony; and that contribution was growing fast. Already the best of customers, she took for her share more than a fourth part of the sixteen million pounds' worth in annual value at which the British exports were then computed; and no limit could be named to the expansion of a trade founded on the wants of a population which had doubled itself within a quarter of a century, and whose standard of comfort was rising even more rapidly than its numbers. But the glory which was reflected on our country by her great colony was not to be measured by tons of goods or thousands of dollars. All who loved England wisely, dwelt with satisfaction upon the prosperity of America. It was to them a proud thought that so great a mass of industry, such universally diffused comfort, so much public disinterestedness and private virtue, should have derived its origin from our firesides, and have grown up under our ægis.

It is impossible to avoid regretting that American society and the American character were not allowed to develope themselves in a natural and unbroken growth from the point which they had reached at the close of the first century and a half of their history. The Revolutionary war which began in 1775 changed many things and troubled many waters; as a civil war always has done, and always must. In England, at the end of the protracted conflict between the Stuarts and the party which stood for liberty, Englishmen were very different from what they had been when it began. That difference was not in all respects for the better, as is shown by a comparison between the biographies of our public men, and the records of our country houses, at the one period and the other. And in like manner the mutual hatred felt, and the barbarities inflicted and suffered, by partisans of either side in Georgia and the Carolinas between 1776 and 1782 left behind them in those regions habits of lawlessness and violence evil traces of which lasted into our lifetime. As for the Northern

States, it was a pity that the wholesome and happy conditions of existence prevailing there before the struggle for Independence were ever disturbed; for no change was likely to improve them. If the King, as a good shepherd, was thinking of his flock and not of himself, it is hard to see what he hoped to do for their benefit. All they asked of him was to be let alone; and with reason; for they had as just cause for contentment as the population of any ideal State from More's Utopia downwards. Indeed, the American colonists had the best in the comparison, for there existed among them a manliness, a self-reliance, and a spirit of clear-sighted conformity to the inexorable laws of the universe, which are not to be found in the romances of optimism. "I have lately," wrote Franklin, “made a tour through Ireland and Scotland. In those countries a small part of the society are landlords, great noblemen, and gentlemen, extremely opulent, living in the highest affluence and magnificence. The bulk of the people are tenants, extremely poor, living in the most sordid wretchedness, in dirty hovels of mud and straw, and clothed only in rags. I thought often of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family." 1

It was no wonder that they were freeholders; inasmuch as real property could be bought for little in the cultivated. parts of New England, and for next to nothing in the outlying districts. Land was no dearer as the purchaser travelled southwards. There is in existence an amus-, ing series of letters from a certain Alexander Mackrabie in America to his brother-in-law in England: and that brother-in-law knew a good letter from a dull one, inasmuch as he was Philip Francis. In 1770 Mackrabie wrote from Philadelphia to ask what possessed Junius

1 Benjamin Franklin to Joshua Badcock, London, 13 January, 1772.

to address the King in a letter "past all endurance," and to inquire who the devil Junius was. He sweetened the alarm which he unconsciously gave to his eminent correspondent by offering him a thousand good acres in Maryland for a hundred and thirty pounds, and assuring him that farms on the Ohio would be "as cheap as stinking mackerel."1 Colonists whose capital consisted in their four limbs, especially if they were skilled mechanics, had no occasion to envy people who could buy land, or who had inherited it. Social existence in America was profoundly influenced by the very small variation of income, and still smaller of expenditure, at every grade of the scale. The Governor of a great province could live in style in his city house and his country house, and could keep his coach and what his guests called a genteel table, on five hundred pounds a year, or something like thirty shillings for each of his working days. A ship's carpenter, in what was for America a great city, received five and sixpence a day, including the value of his pint of rum, the amount of alcohol contained in which was about an equivalent to the Governor's daily allowance of Madeira. The Rector of Philadelphia Academy, who taught Greek and Latin, received two hundred pounds a year; the Mathematical Professor a hundred and twenty-five pounds; and the three Assistant Tutors sixty pounds apiece; —all in local currency, from which about forty per cent. would have to be deducted in order to express the sums in English money. In currency of much the same value a house carpenter or a bricklayer earned eight shillings a day, which was as much as a Mathematical Professor, and twice as much as an Assistant Tutor.2

All lived well. All had a share in the best that was going; and the best was far from bad. The hot buck

1 Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, vol. i., p. 439.

The salaries are mentioned in various letters of Franklin. The wages he quotes from Adam Smith, who, says his biographer, “had been in the constant habit of hearing much about the American colonies and their affairs, during his thirteen years in Glasgow, from the intelligent merchants and returned planters of the city."— Rae's Life of Adam Smith, p. 266.

wheat cakes, the peaches, the great apples, the turkey or wild-goose on the spit, and the cranberry sauce stewing in the skillet, were familiar luxuries in every household. Authoritative testimony has been given on this point by Brillat Savarin, in his "Physiologie de Goût," — the most brilliant book extant on that which, if mankind were candid, would be acknowledged as the most universally interesting of all the arts. When he was driven from his country by the French Revolution, he dined with a Connecticut yeoman on the produce of the garden, the farmyard, and the orchard. There was "a superb piece of corned beef, a stewed goose, and a magnificent leg of mutton, with vegetables of every description, two jugs of cider, and a tea-service," on the table round which the illustrious epicure, the host, and the host's four handsome daughters were sitting. For twenty years and thirty years past such had been the Sunday and holiday fare of a New England freeholder; except that in 1774 a pretty patriot would as soon have offered a guest a cup of vitriol as a cup of tea. A member of what in Europe was called the lower class had in America fewer cares, and often more money, than those who, in less favoured lands, would have passed for his betters. His children were taught at the expense of the township; while a neighbour who aspired to give his son a higher education was liable to be called on to pay a yearly fee of no less than a couple of guineas. And the earner of wages was emancipated from the special form of slavery which from very early days had established itself in the Northern States, - the tyranny exercised over the heads of a domestic establishment by those whom they had occasion to employ.1

1 "You can have no idea," Mackrabie wrote to Francis in 1769, "of the plague we have with servants on this side the water. If you bring over a good one he is spoilt in a month. Those from the country are insolent and extravagant. The imported Dutch are to the last degree ignorant and awkward." The rest of the observations made by this rather narrow-minded Briton upon the other nationalities which supplied the household service of America had better be read in the original book, if they are read at all. -Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, vol. i., p. 435.

Equality of means, and the total absence of privilege, brought about their natural result in the ease, the simplicity, the complete freedom from pretension, which marked the intercourse of society. The great had once been as the least of their neighbours, and the small looked forward some day to be as the best of them. James Putnam, the ablest lawyer in all America, loved to walk in the lane where, as a child of seven years old, he drove the cows to pasture. Franklin, while still a poor boy living on eighteen pence a week, was sought, and almost courted, by the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Governor of New York. Confidence in a future which never deceived the industrious showed itself in early marriages; and early marriages brought numerous, healthy, and welcome children. There was no searching of heart in an American household when a new pair of hands was born into the world. The first Adams who was a colonist had eight sons, with whatever daughters heaven sent him; his eldest son had a family of twelve, and his eldest son a family of twelve again. Franklin had seen thirteen of his own father's children sitting together round the table, who all grew up, and who all in their turn were married. "With us," he wrote, "marriages are in the morning of life; our children are educated and settled in the world by noon; and thus, our own business being done, we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves."

The jolly relative of Philip Francis took a less roseate view of the same phenomenon. "The good people," he wrote, "are marrying one another as if they had not a day to live. I allege it to be a plot that the ladies, (who are all politicians in America), are determined to raise young rebels to fight against old England." Throughout the colonies the unmarried state was held in scanty honour. Bachelors, whether in the cities or villages, were poorly supplied with consolations and distractions. The social resources of New York, even for a hospitably treated stranger, were not inexhaustible.