MEMENTOS.

"LET us read, and recollect, and impress upon our souls, the views and ends of our own more immediate forefathers, in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness. Let us examine into the nature of that power, and the cruelty of that oppression, which drove them from their homes. Recollect their amazing fortitude, their bitter sufferings! the hunger, the nakedness, the cold, which they patiently endured! the severe labours of clearing their grounds, building their houses, raising their provisions, amidst dangers from wild beasts and savage men, before they had time, or money, or materials for commerce! Recollect the civil and religious principles, and hopes, and expectations, which constantly supported and carried them through all hardships, with patience and resignation!"

Essay on the Canon and Feudal Law, by John Adams, Esq. 1765.

“If we do not, my lords, get the better of America, America will get the better of us. We do not fear, at present, that they will attack us at home; but consider, on the other hand, what will be the fate of the sugar islands, what will be the fate of our trade to that country. That, my lords, is a most valuable, important consideration; it is the best feather in our wing. The people of America are preparing to raise a navy; they have begun in part; trade will beget opulence, and by that means they will be enabled to hire ships from foreign powers." Lord Mansfield, House of Lords, 1775.

“It hurts me to hear a proposition urged in this house, so destructive to the welfare of Britain, as American independence. Would not the independency of America be the eve of their advancement into a flourishing naval power? Their situation commanding a species of superiority over all the earth, they would soon rival Europe in arts, as well as grandeur, and their power in particular would rear itself on the decay of ours. Are we, then, so lost to all the feelings of patriotism, that, with a wanton hand, we would lay the foundation stone of a blockade against our own existence?

Mr. Pulteney, House of Commons, 1777.

"We have heard, indeed, the prosperity of America declared, by Lord Sidmouth, when he was minister of state, to be an awful warning to Great Britain, never hereafter to colonize a new country. Merciful Heaven! that the brethren of our ancestors should have founded a mighty empire, indefinite in its increase-an empire, which retains, and is spreading, all that constitutes "country" in a wise man's feelings, viz. the same laws, the same customs, the same religion, and, above all, the same language; that, in short, to have been the mother of a prosperous empire, is to be a warning to Great Britain! And whence this dread? Because, forsooth, our eldest born, when of age, had set up for himself; and not only preserving, but, in an almost incalculable

proportion, increasing the advantages of former reciprocal intercourse, had saved us the expense and anxiety of defending, and the embarrassment of governing a country three thousand miles distant! That this separation was at length effected by violence, and the horrors of a civil war, is to be attributed solely to the ignorance and corruption of the many, and the perilous bigotry of a few."-No. 24, Edinburgh Review.

“Let our jealousy burn as it may; let our intolerance of America be as unreasonably violent as we please; still, it is plain that she is a power, in spite of us, rapidly rising to supremacy; or, at least, that each year so mightily augments her strength, as to overtake, by a most sensible distance, even the most formidable of her competitors."

No. 49, Edinburgh Review.

"In one of my late rambles, I accidentally fell into the company of half a dozen gentlemen, who were engaged in a warm dispute about some political affair; which naturally drew me in for a share of the con

versation.

"Amongst a multiplicity of other topics, we took occasion to talk of the different characters of the several nations of Europe; when one of the gentlemen, cocking his hat, and assuming such an air of importance as if he had possessed all the merit of the English nation in his own person, declared that the Dutch were a parcel of avaricious wretches; the French a set of flattering sycophants; that the Germans were drunken sots, and beastly gluttons; and the Spaniards proud, haughty, and surly tyrants; but that, in bravery, generosity, clemency, and in every other virtue, the English excelled all the rest of the world.

"This very learned and judicious remark was received with a general smile of approbation by all the company-all, I mean, but your humble servant." GOLDSMITH'S ESSAYS-Essay XI.

PART I.

SECTION I.

CALIFORNIA

cr

35

OF THE POLITICAL AND MERCANTILE JEALOUSY OF

GREAT BRITAIN.

"AMERICA is destined, at all events, to be a great and SECT. I. powerful nation. In less than a century, she must have a population of at least seventy or eighty millions. War can"not prevent, and it appears from experience, can scarcely "retard, this natural multiplication. All these people will "speak English; and, according to the most probable conjecture, will live under free governments, whether republican or monarchical, and will be industrious, well educated, and "civilized. Within no very great distance of time, there"fore, within a period to which those who are now en"tering life may easily survive,-America will be one of "the most powerful and important nations of the earth; "and her friendship and commerce will be more valued, "in all probability, than that of any European state." Such were the speculations of the Edinburgh Review, in the year 1814. In looking forward to what this journal predicts, to the supremacy in power and character which the North Americans are destined to reach,-there is something not only curious, but instructive, in the fact, that they have been and are more contemned and defamed, than any other people of whom history has kept a record. Compared with our fate in this respect, that of Boeotia among the ancients, severe as it was and sufficiently unjust, may be described as condign and lenient. It was not alone in their exemption * from political and commercial dependence, that the colonies

VOL. I.

PART I. of Greece may be said to have been more fortunate than those of modern Europe. Neither enlightened Greece,-nor even imperious Rome, or rapacious Carthage whose colonial policy bore a nearer resemblance to the modern,-made perpetual war upon the reputation of its emigrant offspring. The parent state was sometimes exorbitant in its demands, and tyrannical in the exercise of its superior force; but the colony had not to contend with a system of universal detraction;-to serve as a mark for the arrogance, spleen, or jocularity of orators, poets, and reviewers.

The wise man of Europe-homo sapiens Europa-not satisfied with sneering and railing at these distant settlements, conspired, at one time, to decry nature herself in her operations on the new continent: and the theories of Buffon, Raynal, and De Paw, so fashionable and authoritative during a certain period,. though now so entirely exploded, are to be cited in illustration of the state of the European mind towards the Western World. The feature not the least remarkable, belonging to this case is, that the particular mothercountry which might have been expected to be most tender of the feelings and character of her colonies, out of a due regard to justice, gratitude, and her own interests, was, at times, the most scornful in her tone, and the loudest in the chorus of obloquy. GREAT BRITAIN continued to throw out sarcasms and reproaches against her North American kinsmen, after the continent of Europe had adopted the opposite style, and had even passed into an enthusiastic admiration. We may pardon vapouring, and invective, and affected derision, at the juncture when her authority was directly questioned, and her colossal power braved by the thirteen pigmy communities of provincials; and some allowance is to be made for the play of passions strongly excited, during and immediately after the struggle, by which she lost so valuable a portion of her empire: But the same course has been pursued without any abatement of virulence or exception of topics, towards these Independent United States; it has not been abandoned after a second war, and after a development of character, resources, and destinies, which would seem sufficient to silence malice and subdue the most sturdy prejudice. When the "plantations" had grown into colonies, England still thought and spoke of them as the plantations:-since the colonies have transformed themselves into an independent and powerful nation, it is the colonies, with an imagery to which increased jealousy and despite have added new and more hideous chimeras, that are yet seen in the English speculum.