cording to their own ideas and without the interference of a legislature separated by three thousand miles of sea.

For a hundred and fifty years these people had developed under the stimulus of their own institutions. They had created their own civilization. Their society was formed on their own system. There had grown up their own code. Customs, laws, society had been modified to meet their own requirements. Englishmen they were in name, but America to them was home. These were the people that in 1760 were waiting for the curtain to rise on the last act of colonial history, and put on the stage the drama of the Revolution.

CHAPTER III

AMERICA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

RHETORIC has slain more truths than ignorance. To enhance the dramatic, historian and romanticist have magnified the power of Britain at the time of the Revolution and dwelt with undue emphasis upon "the struggling colonies," upon the hardships and misery of the colonial troops at Valley Forge, upon the difficulties encountered to clothe and feed and pay them, until the world has come to believe that when the colonists declared their independence of the Crown they were not only few in number but wretchedly poor; that they suffered for the necessities of life, that compared with the English they were cave dwellers, their civilization low and their resources scanty. Now as a matter of fact, while in population and wealth they were greatly inferior to the English, in some respects they enjoyed advantages not possessed by them, and nothing is more erroneous than the belief that their poverty was great or that their social organization was still rudimentary.1

By nature and instinct the Puritan was a business

1 The country, Fiske says, never put forth more than a small fraction of its available strength in the Revolution. The American Revolution, vol. II, p. 26.

man and never forgot the main chance; while he perpetually thanked God for His manifold mercies, he nevertheless thought much about his money; the fact that he was ingenuous enough to record in the same sentence his thanks to God and his anxiety whether a creditor would defraud him, has given rise to the belief that the Puritan was a monstrous hypocrite, whose religion was merely a cloak for his cant and Pecksniffian ways and a cover under which to exact the last farthing. Thus Sewall in his Diary has a characteristic entry under date of March 19, 1693: "Benjamin Hallawell, late captive of Algier, and his infant daughter, Mary, were baptized. When I first saw him in London, I could hardly persuade myself that he could live over the Sea, and now I see him and his daughter baptized. Lord let it be a Token that Thou wilt revive thy work in the midst of the years. In London, 't was some discouragement to me to think how hardly 't would come off for the father to pay me for the English money I had disbursed for the Redemption of a dead Son: but God has given him a new life." 1

Of the New Englander, General Greene wrote shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution: "The common people are exceedingly avaricious; the genius of the people is commercial, from their long intercourse of trade." A hundred years before Greene, a visiting Englishman discovered America and

1 Sewall: Diary, vol. 1, p. 375.

2 Irving: Life of Washington, vol. I, p. 119.

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turned out the usual book. "The grose Goddons, or great masters," he wrote, "as also some of their Merchants are damnable rich; generally all of their judgment, inexplicably covetous and proud, they receive your gifts but as an homage or tribute due to their transcendency."1 A modern New Englander wrote of his Puritan forbears, "It was in the practical that they showed their true quality, as Englishmen are wont," and he tells us: "They were business men, men of facts and figures no less than of religious earnestness. The sum of two hundred thousand pounds had been invested in their undertaking a sum, for that time, truly enormous as the result of private combination for a doubtful experiment. That their enterprise might succeed, they must show a balance on the right side of the countinghouse ledger, as well as in their private accounts with their own souls. The liberty of praying when and how they would, must be balanced with an ability of paying when and as they ought.' It was this money-getting instinct of the Puritan that made the Northern Colonies so prosperous, and stimulated them to engage in manufacturing enterprises despite the obstacle of repressive English legislation.

3

It is common belief that the Jews, from instinct and as the result of persecution, from being denied other opportunities for displaying their intellectual

1 Josselyn: An Account of Two Voyages to New England, p. 180. 2 Lowell: Among My Books, vol. 1, p. 232. 3 Lowell: Op. cit., p. 235.

powers, and from a sordid love of money, in the course of time developed into a race of extraordinarily able money-getters and traders; but it is doubtful if they had the same capacity for business and commerce on a large scale as the Puritans. The Jew became a money-lender and a financier, the banker to advance money on a venture that promised a rich return on his capital invested, to speculate through the energy and hardihood of men willing to undergo much toil and meet many dangers for the use of his money; but the Jews were originally a pastoral people and had no impulse for adventure, and it was necessity alone that drove them to the display of physical energy. With the Puritan it was different. He came from a line of men accustomed to hard work, who had toughened under severe manual labor, who had lived frugal lives, who when work was to be done did it with their own hands. The difference between the "money sense" of the Jew and the Puritan is the difference between the banker and the trader. The one discounts paper and makes advances on a bill of lading; the other buys and sells merchandise, or charters a ship in the hope of finding a market for his cargo. It is the trader and not the banker whose knowledge of commerce and the wants of a people is great, because usually he has learned by experience and from having worked his way up; whose success, among other qualities, is due to his frugality and thrift, who sends his cargo to foreign lands,