spired respect. Justice gave place to chicanery, and cunning was a greater quality than honesty.

Civilization drove the pirate off the sea. When humanity could no longer tolerate the letter of marque, the licensed pirate was no more. Commercial piracy in America has not yet been destroyed, but there are fewer Morgans and Kidds and Blackbeards than there once were, and the day shall as surely come when there are none as that day came when Governor Spotswood's stout cruisers took the head of Blackbeard, the "Last of the Pirates," nearly two centuries ago.

CHAPTER XV

THE INFLUENCE OF IMMIGRATION ON AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT

FROM the beginning of national existence the Americans have been a sectional people, with little in common between the North and South. A feeling that began in indifference rapidly developed into contempt and ripened into dislike; from the first the men of the North took a different view of life and morals and economics from those of the South; there developed two antagonistic schools of political and economic thought that for sixty years kept the country in a state of turmoil and fierce political agitation; that aroused passion, and finally culminated in that war which marks the third epoch of American development. This antagonism was made apparent with the adoption of the Constitution, when the infant nation was in its swaddling clothes.1 It was as bitter then as it was half a century later, when bitterness could only be appeased by blood. Then, as in the next century, it should have rent the Union and broken the Confederation into detached states. Yet the marvel is — and the

1 Cf. Winsor: Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. vII, chaps. 3 and 4, passim.

whole history of this people is almost fabulous that jealousy and dislike only served to increase the strength of the country as a whole, to make it richer and more prosperous and more unassailable from external attack. The growth of the strength and power of the United States has not been observed by rivals without envy, and they have hoped the day was to come when they might turn sectional jealousies to their profit. Such hopes have been in vain. Since the day when the Americans emancipated themselves from the power of England they have never been in danger of losing their independence by foreign intrigue, nor of seeing the Union dismembered by parts of it seeking the protection of a foreign flag. Antipathy was never so violent that it was not forgotten when a common danger threatened; and yet, while it was quieted in the face of peril, it was never silenced.

In all that goes to make character, in customs and social conventions, in education and training, in the manner of living, in physical environment, which is one of the great influences on character; in the products of the soil and the industries of the two sections, the people of the South have always been unlike those of the North.1 In the first place, Southern

1 "In the American states slavery speedily gravitated to the South. The climate of the Southern provinces was eminently favorable to the negroes; and the crops, and especially the rice crops, which had been introduced into South Carolina from Madagascar in 1698, --- could hardly be cultivated by whites. In the Northern provinces the conditions were exactly reversed. We can scarcely have a better illustration of the controlling action of the physical on the moral world than is furnished by this fact. The conditions of cli

labor was slave labor, while that of the North was free; and society resting on an enslaved class has a social and moral viewpoint different from that in which free labor exists. We have seen in the previous volume how Virginia and the Carolinas were influenced by the introduction of slave labor and the concentration of that labor on the production of tobacco, rice, and indigo; and with the increase of population and the expansion of trade, which created a greater demand for the products of the South, the early influence of slavery and the narrowing effect of agriculture became more marked on character. In New England and the Middle Colonies there was a large agricultural population, but their wealth was not in the soil. The North was growing rich on its manufactures and commerce, its carrying trade and its fisheries; its exports and its imports were the real source of its prosperity. The diversity of the industries and interests of the North, the fact that all activity was based on voluntary service, that made every man, within limits, his own master and inspired him with a feeling of independence, gave the Northern man a wider, a more generous view of life than the Southern man, morally debased by contact with slavery and en

mate, which made the Northern provinces free states and the Southern provinces slave states, established between them an intense social and moral repulsion, kindled mutual feelings of the bitterest hatred and contempt, and in our own day produced a war which threatened the whole future of American civilization." Lecky: A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol.

II, p. 19.

grossed in only one thing-and that the least stimulating to intellectual effort.1

The difference between the Northern business man of that day and the Southern planter is the difference in our day between the exporter who sends his wares to all parts of the globe, who sells pins or buys elephant tusks, to whom a revolution in South America or an earthquake in Java is of direct personal interest as affecting his ventures, and the village shopkeeper who is untouched by revolutions or earthquakes and has no horizon beyond the limits of his little community.

The North was prosperous; the prosperity of the South, in some respects, was even greater. Its rice and indigo fields gave enormous and profitable yields that made the planters rich and enabled them to live a luxurious and indolent life, but it was a life that destroyed the feeling of community with the labor that produced wealth. No matter how hard a taskmaster a man may be, free white labor is of his own flesh and blood; men like himself, even although of a lower order; men, in fact, and not things. Enslaved labor is a chattel, property like a horse or a hoe, to be taken care of because it has a

1 Oldmixon wrote that Virginia was able to compete with New England and New York in certain manufactures; they might make brandy and “have sugar from their sugar tree," "yet they are so lazy that they will be at no pains to provide themselves with anything which they can fetch elsewhere for tobacco. But all their thoughts run upon tobacco and they make nothing of those advantages which would enrich an industrious people." — The British Empire in America, vol. 1, pp. 320-21.