The Rise of American Civilization by Charles Austin Beard Mary Ritter decorations by Wilfred Jones one volume edition 1930 the Macmillan Company New York Victoria College Library Victoria, British Columbia copyright, 1927 and 1930 Published April, 1927. Reprinted May, June, November, 1927; February, 1928; July, 1929. One volume edition with new introduction, published 1930 2 INTRODUCTION The history of a civilization, if intelligently conceived, may be an instrument of civilization. Surveying life as a whole, as distinguished from microscopic analysis by departments, it ought to come nearer than any partial history to the requirements of illumination. As long as the various divisions of history are kept separate, each must be incomplete and distorted; for, as Buckle says, the philosophy of any subject (that is, the truth of it) is not at its center but on the periphery where it impinges on all other sciences. Dealing with all the manifestations of the inner powers of a people, as well as the trappings of war and politics, the history of a civilization is essentially dynamic, suggesting capacities yet unexplored and hinting of emancipation from outward necessities. By the sharp questions it raises in every quarter it may give new direction to self-criticism and creative energy, aid in generating a richer “intellectual climate,” and help in establishing the sovereignty of high plan, design, or ideal. Besides thus representing an effort at understanding a particular social drama in its many phases, the history of a civilization may symbolize a certain coming to maturity in that civilization itself. What adult with any claim to ripeness of spirit would admit belonging merely to one category of history —as warrior, politician, money-getter, novelist, sportsman, mortician, journalist, husband, wife, father, or mother— and aspiring to nothing more ? When the dust of the earth became conscious of the dust, a transformation began to take place in the face of the earth. This is only another way of repeating Walter Pater’s convincing argument that a concentration of interest is the condition precedent to the finest flowering of the arts, sciences, philosophies, and life itself “with all its powers of love and joy and admiration.” To make a great age of enlightenment and elevation, “personalities, many- sided and concentrated,” are necessary, and as long as artists, thinkers, and directors live in isolation, absorbed in specialties and indifferent to the main stream, they fall short of that universality that gives full stature to genius. If the past of a people is conceived of as a mere string of episodes on the level of village gossip or metropolitan society news, how then can complex and complete personalities be nourished and inspired ? On what substance can they thrive ? On the abstractions of an absolute philosophy ? On borrowings from neighbors presumably superior ? On what the 3 Greeks and Romans thought worth while, though remote from the realities of the present age ? On cornflakes, electric irons, and “values” verbalized in professorial studies ? Recognizing that even the “fine arts” must have roots in soil of some kind, a writer recently asked in one of our critical magazines whether it was desirable for painters to be intelligent. The question is highly pertinent to the theme under consideration here. And in at least one artistic circle the problem thus posed was discussed with light as well as heat. All the debaters who took part in the argument admitted that the mere copying of models never made an artist, that no copy was ever superior in essence to the work of the original master. All likewise agreed that, while a moron might be ingenious in the handling of brush and color, no moron could be a master painter. He must know “something” and possess some powers of discernment. What “something” ? Something about the nature of the people and subjects represented, about the goal to be attained in their portrayal. That much was readily conceded. And the general conclusion seemed to be that, given appreciation of older art forms and personal competence, the more a painter knows about the civilization in which he lives and works, its driving forces, its ruling orders, its ambitions, and its apparent future, the better equipped he is for the kind of artistic achievement that adds to civilization. And how can powers of discernment be sharpened ? Scarcely by thrusting them into the fog. If the history of a people is a philosophy of the whole social organism in process of becoming, then it ought to furnish material with which discernment can be whetted. That is what Emerson must have had in mind when he advised Americans, in search of the full life, to stand fast where they are and work out their destiny in the place allotted to them by history for the fulfillment of their capacities. If it is necessary for artists to know something, what is to be said of the makers of beautiful letters and their critics ? Can a great novelist chase heroes, villains, and heroines around the eternal triangle without possessing awareness of anything beyond the number three ? Even the stoutest apostle of heredity as the determining factor in genius leaves a loophole for environment and the most cautious speculators in the biologic field suspect that heredity and environment are aspects of the same thing. In any case, separated they are meaningless. How then can the novelist ignore his own heritage and that of his characters and plots, at least if he fain would be great or hopes to be declared great by the verdict of mankind, beyond which there is no appeal ? Can he 4 draw with superb skill men and women belonging to a landed aristocracy, a bourgeoisie, or a proletariat without knowing about their origins, about the clashes, types, and modes of living prevalent within these several orders ? Take feudalism out of Scott, Victorian poverty out of Dickens, modern urban misery out. of Zola, and what would be left ? Or at all events, what would be the significance of the vestiges ? Is the Russian novelist of today writing in the same vein as the Russian novelist of 1898 ? Will his successors in 1950 write in the manner of today ? If not, why not? We cannot escape the conclusion that with changes in civilization come changes in the nutriment which feeds writers and moralists, and in the materials with which they work. Then it follows that an ideal history of a civilization would help to explain writers to themselves, audiences to audiences, actors to actors while disclosing the reciprocal relations of writers, audiences, and actors. The profounder, wider, and more realistic the history, the greater its services presumably to letters and criticism. In this relation it is well to emphasize the fact that artists and writers live by patronage. It has always been so. The sculptors who carved the gates for the Pharaohs worked with respect to the desires, whims, ambitions, and concepts of power cherished by their patrons. Medieval artists worked for lords and ladies, merchants, and churchmen. Modern novelists also have to remember the market and literary arbiters. It is hardly thinkable that Elmer Gantry is purchased in large quantities by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Who then can and does long pursue that pure, chaste, unworldly thing called art for art’s sake ? Has the greatest art, plastic or verbal, flowed from its unrealities? By the history of a civilization showing patrons of the arts how they came to be what they are, a new environment might possibly be created for the arts, contributing to the conscious evolution of the civilization described and interpreted. It must not be thought, however, that the history of a civilization is concerned primarily with arts and letters —the so- called cultural accomplishments— assuming that they could be separated without physical violence from the rest of the organism. It is true, there is a tradition to the effect that the makers of arts and letters must speak scornfully of trade and industry, as “material pursuits’’ to be distinguished from “spiritual endeavors.” And by way of reciprocity practical men are sometimes wont to speak of artists and writers as mere luxuries (frightfully near the lunatic fringe) to be tolerated in the name of respectability. But in plain 5 truth the plastic arts are based on the artisanship of practice, while modern trade and industry cannot thrive in an intellectual and artistic desert. In the history of social philosophy there is nothing more interesting than the tardy recognition accorded to the fact that modern business enterprise rests upon the whole heritage of western civilization —its religious disciplines, its laws and morals, its crafts and skills, its sciences and arts, its tastes and aspirations. How, for example, could such enterprise operate without mathematics or design ? Let a shrewd capitalist erect a factory in an African jungle and then look around for a competent labor supply and an appreciative market, suppose we say, for electrical appliances ! Business enterprise has been built upon a heritage of civilization, and its directors are likely to be civilized just in proportion as they understand the history of their heritage without which they would be as economic infants. More than that. They are in their turn the makers of civilization as well as patrons of the arts. In some mysterious way thought and the materials of life evolve together. One classic illustration of this is the invention of gunpowder which, at first blush, seems to have no relation to civilization —at least to civilization considered narrowly in terms of art and mind. But, as Buckle points out, gun-powder, with its accompanying engines, made necessary the development of competent specialists in military affairs and released a large proportion of the population of every country from the responsibility for fighting which fell upon all freemen when pikes and bows and arrows were the weapons of warfare. “In this way immense bodies of men were gradually weaned from their old warlike habits and being, as it were, forced into civil life, their energies became available for the general purposes of society and for the cultivation of those arts of peace which had formerly been neglected. The result was that the European mind, instead of being, as heretofore, solely occupied either with war or theology, now struck out into a middle path, and created those great branches of knowledge to which modern civilization owes its origin.” Even if overstressed the point is real. Moreover, gunpowder contributed to the downfall of the be- castled, be-walled, shut-off, and embattled feudal aristocracy and to the rise of modern urbanism with its world outlook and rich exfoliations. If a single matter of gunpowder could make such “contributions to civilization,” what may be said of the possibilities of electricity in the hands of modern enterprise ? Is it not possible 6 that five centuries from now the beginnings of a new moral and intellectual order may be traced to the first whirling dynamo ? Arising from a complex cultural heritage and being itself a maker of culture, business enterprise cannot survive and develop without civilization. It is sometimes fancied that employers of labor desire only robots to attend their engines and wheels. In a system of very restricted production —such as some writers are fond of praising— production of quality for patricians, no doubt it would be possible for capitalism to succeed in a small way with its workers as cogs —assuming that a cog can follow a master design. But a system of mass production in great variety could never appear in a nation of pure robots; could not endure if perchance it were imported. A human robot needs only food and shelter. Designs, colors, shapes, and diversity of commodities are as naught to a cog. If therefore the modern capitalist is as materialistic, primitive, and indifferent to culture as he is often depicted, then by internal contradictions his order of society is doomed to dissolution. If, as claimed, some form of socialism, based on machine industry, lies beyond the present regime, it will certainly take a civilized people to operate it. Besides being involved in the whole process of human evolution from top to bottom, in war and in peace, as bearers of the heritage and workers in the arts and sciences, women stand in a peculiar relation to the psychological centrum, the market, around which modern industry revolves, and to the periphery where it affects all culture. Although from Caesar’s day onward, strong men have denounced “those things which tend to effeminacy,” as a matter of brutal fact without those very things there would be little more than caves and barracks or bare monastic walls in the wide world. However that may be historically, women are now the chief buyers of goods, including letters and arts, thus within generous limits the directors of business enterprise and taste. According to recent estimates, women in the United States pay taxes on more than three billion dollars of individual income annually, receive seventy per cent of the estates left by men, and sixty-four per cent of the estates left by women. In a burst of prophecy, one statistician tells us that, assuming the continuance of the present rate of transfer, all the property in the country will be in the hands of women by the year 2035 ! What then becomes of the feminist dictum that a civilization can rise no higher than the status of its women ? Whether this contention is true of societies founded on war and priestcraft, it 7 certainly seems to be true of an industrial order —a system of mass production for diversified popular consumption. Leaving aside for the moment women’s relations to arts and letters, it must be admitted that their power as the buyers of goods gives them a strategic position in the unfolding of modern civilization. Hence they too must be drawn into the main stream of history as thought. So much for the constructive services which might be rendered by the history of a civilization. On the side of negation something also may be claimed. By its very nature this type of history is three dimensional, rather than two. Properly executed, it disposes of the idea that nations are moral personalities which have chosen a way of life out of the loftier wisdom or the lower perversity. It is equally ruinous to the conception of civilization as a kind of garment which willful men and women insist on wearing out of ignorance or conceit, or can put on and off at their pleasure. It offers no tribute to chauvinistic vanities, interests, and intrigues and is a constant warning against the perils of treason to intelligence. Treating a given civilization as a growing organism, it is an antidote to two-dimensional surveys based on sights and sounds of wonderment and bewilderment. It bolsters no political grudges, national or international, in the guise of journalistic portraiture. But we have attached a condition to all these generalizations —“if intelligently conceived and properly executed.” The history of a civilization cannot be written by patching together constitutions, statutes, political speeches, newspaper items, private letters, memoirs, and diplomatic notes. The author of such a work must at the outset accept the theorem that “history is philosophy open at both ends” and in selection and construction must wrestle continually with that baffling proposition. The risks of error are staggering; the danger of folly is greater. But what is the alternative for those who are not content to treat life as an inorganic one- thing-after-another and history as a string of anecdotes? Perhaps those who try to find paths, even where there are none, stimulate path-finding if only by their mistakes. Those who build armatures for artists are not without their uses. To raise some kind of benchmark or point of assertion visible to adepts engrossed in specialties may aid in that process of drawing together, out of which the history of all civilizations may arise, contributing powerfully to the enrichment of civilization. As early as 1752, Voltaire made a plea for this type of history and sought to exemplify it in his work on France under the Grand 8 Monarch. The very title of his book, “The Age of Louis XIV,” was significant. He did not call it “The Marvellous and Miraculous Exploits of Louis XIV drawn from Authentick Accounts of His Life and Deeds” nor did he style it “Louis Quatorze: Ses Amours.” In his preface he announced his intention to describe “not the actions of a single man, but the character of society.” Military achievements Voltaire summarized; affairs of internal government were given due space; ecclesiastical matters were brought into the picture. But to the staples of old history were added commerce, finance, science, and the progress of the fine arts. In another volume of historical studies Voltaire explained: “I wish to write a history, not of wars, but of society; and to ascertain how people lived in the interior of their families and what were the arts they commonly cultivated. .... I want to know what were the steps by which mankind passed from barbarism to civilization.” Excellent as were the argument and the demonstration, writers attuned to tradition have shrunk from the challenge. When a novice, Henry Thomas Buckle, attempted to meet it, his melancholy failures were more widely celebrated than his notable achievements. Every such wreck added to the discouragements that beset historical explorers. Yet, conceivably, it might be better to be wrecked on an express train bound to a destination than to moulder in a freight car sidetracked in a well-fenced lumber yard. 9 Contents I. England’s Colonial Secret 11 II. Laying the Structural Base of the American Colonies 34 III. The Growth of Economic and Political Power 71 IV. Provincial America 104 V. The Clash of Metropolis and Colony 156 VI. Independence and Civil Conflict 187 VII. Populism and Reaction 241 VIII. The Rise of National Parties 271 IX. Agricultural Imperialism and the Balance of Power 315 X. The Young Republic 351 XI. New Agricultural States 406 XII. Jacksonian Democracy --- A Triumphant Farmer-Labor Party 433 XIII. Westward to the Pacific 464 XIV. The Sweep of Economic Forces 502 XV. The Politics of the Economic Drift 530 XVI. Democracy: Romantic and Realistic 580 10 Chapter I England's Colonial Secret The discovery, settlement, and expansion of America form merely one phase in the long and restless movement of mankind on the surface of the earth. When the curtain of authentic history first rose on the human scene, tribes, war bands, and armies had already seared plains and valleys with their trails and roads and launched their boats on the trackless seas. Viewed from a high point in time, the drama of the races seems to be little more than a record of migrations and shifting civilizations, with their far-reaching empires —Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Abyssinian, Athenian, Roman, Mongol, Turkish, and Manchu— as fleeting periods of apparent pause and concentration in the universal flow of things. It was not without some warrant, perhaps, that one of the very earliest Greek philosophers, Anaximander, more than five centuries before the Christian era, reached the startling conclusion that the cosmos which he beheld with penetrating eyes was a limitless flood, ever in motion, throwing up new forms and beings and drawing them again into its devouring immensity according to the law of destiny —whirling worlds, swaying tides, growing crops, wandering herds, puny man, and his little systems erected proudly for a day against eternity being but symbols of an unchanging force, the essence of all reality. Conceived even in terms of modern mathematics, a purely mechanistic philosophy is engaging in its simplicity, but we are warned by one recent historian, Henry Adams, that mere motion cannot account for direction or for the problems of vital energy; and by another, Oswald Spengler, that “there is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence, as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood —a logic of direction as against a logic of extension.” More than two thousand years after Anaximander, in the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, Hegel, seeking the solution to the endless changes of history, came to the conclusion that the evolution of humanity was, in its inmost nature, the progressive revelation of the divine spirit. Assuming, as necessary, God the unconditioned, creator and upholder of all, Hegel saw in the kaleidoscopic time-patterns of civilization, strewn through the ages, mere partial reflections of the grand Idea underlying the universe —“an infinite power realizing its aim in the absolute 11 rational design of the world.” Nations rising and declining were to him but pawns in a majestic game, each with its mission to fulfill, with its heroes as servants of their epochs carrying out that aspect of the Idea then fated for realization. And according to this philosopher, the chosen method of the Absolute was movement by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: every system, every concept, every situation calling forth from the vasty deep its opposite, its challenge; the conflict of the two finally reaching a reconciling synthesis or solution. Though logic, would seem to imply that change must be unbroken in the future as in the past, Hegel in fact announced that the goal of the long process had been reached in Germany and the Prussian monarchy: God had labored through the centuries to produce the ideal situation in which Hegel found himself. But that naïve conviction did not prevent his great hypothesis from affecting deeply the thought of the modern age. If historians, working with concepts less ambitious —with concrete relations rather than with ultimates— have been inclined in recent days to avoid the Hegelian creed, theologians and statesmen have continued to the latest hour to find in it the weight of telling argument. Near the close of Hegel’s century, a German economist, Werner Sombart, seeking the dynamic of imperialism, reduced the process to the terms of an everlasting struggle among human societies over feeding places on the wide surface of the earth and over the distribution of the world’s natural resources. While this doctrine is too sweeping in its universality, it is not without illustrations. For three thousand years or more the clash of ancient races and empire builders had, as its goal, possession of the rich valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates, where food for congested populations could be won with ease and ruling classes could be readily founded on servile labor. Every one of the strong empires that rose in those fertile regions and enjoyed a respite of security was in turn overwhelmed by a conquering horde which coveted its land and its accumulated wealth. The spoils of industry were the rewards of valor. When the Athenian empire was at its height, no fewer than a thousand cities paid tribute to its treasury and a lucrative commerce, spread over the Mediterranean, swelled the opulence of its merchants. The age of Pericles had its price. The Carthaginian empire, embracing in its conquered area Northern Africa, Southern Spain, Corsica, Sardinia and half of Sicily, was first and foremost a trading state dominated by the idea of gathering from its subject 12 provinces every particle of wealth that could be wrested from them by arms or squeezed out of them by monopoly. Before the sword of Rome rich Carthage fell. When the two powers came face to face on the soil of Sicily, it was the hope of gain as well as fear of death that carried the vote for war in the Roman assembly. For this we have the authority of Polybius: “The military men told the people that they would get important material benefits from it.” In this simple flash is revealed the powerful passion that drove the armies of the Republic beyond the borders of Italy and at length in many centuries of almost ceaseless aggression extended the empire of Rome to the sands of Arabia and to the snows of Scotland. Perhaps, as that modern pro-consul, Lord Curzon, has said by way of justification, the dominant motive was a search for “defensible frontiers” —something not yet found by any military commander anywhere on the globe. Still the noble lord had to confess in the same breath that Rome, having conquered a world, regarded her provinces “solely from the point of view of revenue.” Varus, who was sent out a poor man to govern Syria, amassed a million in two years. When Rome had grasped more than she could defend, her fair cities and fertile fields became spoils of victory for the German barbarians that had long beaten against her borders. For two hundred years at least the civilization of the Mediterranean world was at the mercy of migratory Teutons. Finally there were no more Roman provinces to seize; then feudal war lords employed their acquisitive talents for the next thousand years in fighting one another over manors and towns, pausing occasionally to unite against the Moslem, who threatened them all with destruction. When, eventually, out of this struggle emerged five states —Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England— strong enough in armed might and rich enough in treasure to engage in larger enterprise, fortune opened for them, first, the Atlantic and then the world arena in which to deploy their unresting energies. As the grateful merchants of London long afterward carved on the tomb of William Pitt, that brilliant forerunner of modern imperialism, commerce was again united with war and made to flourish. It was the age-old lure of substantial things that sent the path- breakers of the seas on their perilous journeys —Columbus across the Atlantic in 1492 and da Gama around the Cape to India six years later. Their adventures were only novel incidents in the continuous search for riches. Centuries before, the Romans had carried on an immense commerce with the gorgeous East; in 13 Oriental markets they gathered spices, silks, perfumes, and jewels for the fashionable shops of the Eternal City, and from their treasure chests poured a golden stream of specie to pay for these luxuries. In vain did the stern Roman moralists —Puritans of that time— cry out against the thoughtless maidens and proud dames who emptied their purses buying gauds and trinkets brought at such cost from the ends of the earth. When the Romans passed, their Teutonic heirs gazed upon the spoils of the East with the same fascination that had gripped the grand ladies of the Via Sacra. All through the middle ages a traffic in the luxuries of the Orient continued with increasing volume, enriching the Mohammedan and Italian merchants who served as brokers for the bazaars of the Indies and the shops of Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Bruges, and London. If the risks of the overland journeys were great, the gains of the dangerous business were enormous. Inevitably, therefore, an ardent desire to enlarge their profits by direct operations seized the traders of Europe, driving first the Italians, then the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French, out upon the wide Atlantic in a search for unbroken water routes to the Far East. It is true that Queen Isabella, on yielding to the importunities of Columbus, stipulated in the bond the conversion of heathens to the true Catholic faith; it is true that Catholic missionaries were pioneers in the economic penetration of unknown lands; but in the main the men who organized and commanded expedition after expedition into Asia, the Americas, and Africa had their hearts set on the profits of trade and the spoils of empire. In fact, Spain followed closely the example of Rome, mother of her civilization, when she sent forth military chieftains to conquer, enslave, rule, and exploit. Nor were the English less eager to gather riches by this process. Sir Francis Drake, who looted his way around the world during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, swept treasure into his chests with a reckless disregard for the rights of private property that would have delighted the Gothic barbarians who plundered their way through the streets of Rome. Captain John Smith was ordered by his superiors to hunt for gold in Virginia and for a passage to the South Seas, where it was thought more booty awaited new vikings. His men too would have enslaved the Indians and ruled a subject population if the fierce, proud spirit of the natives had not baffled their designs. They tried and failed. Even the voyage of the Pilgrims, who fled to America for their conscience’ sake had to be 14 financed; and the capitalists who advanced funds for this hazardous venture expected to reap rewards for their aid. Nevertheless, the story of human migration cannot all be told in terms of commerce, profits, conquest, and exploitation. A search for trade has not been the sole motive that has led wanderers into distant places, an empire of toiling subjects not the only vision before migratory bands. Unquestionably many of the Greek colonies which adorned the Mediterranean fringe rose on the sites of mere trading posts or were planted to make room for redundant populations at home, but others sprang from domestic unrest and from the ambitions of leaders. Moreover, the Greeks went far beyond mere ruling and exploiting; they often peopled colonies with their own racial stocks, reproducing the culture of their homeland, and sometimes even improving on their inheritance. It was in outlying provinces that two of the greatest Greek philosophers, Thales and Pythagoras, set up their schools and it is on the ruins of tiny cities in lands remote from Athens that some of the noblest monuments of Greek taste are found to-day —mute testimony to a faithful reproduction of Hellenic culture. Not even the German migrations into the Roman empire were purely economic in origin. They have been attributed by some writers merely to overpopulation; but the records that have come down to us do not bear out that simple thesis. The causes were varied, including the pressure of invaders driving Germans from their own lands, internecine quarrels ending in the flight of the vanquished over the borders into Rome, countless tribal wars springing from lust and ambition, and finally the lure of Roman luxury and peace. It was only in the final stages of the German invasions into Rome that direction of the process was taken by the organized war band rather than by the moving clan with flocks, herds, and household goods —the war band that conquered and settled down upon subject populations. Though the Spanish migrations which later carried Iberic civilization out into a new Latin empire eventually encircling the globe were an extension of the predatory operation, the heroic deeds of Catholic missionaries, daring for religion’s sake torture and death, bore witness to a new force in the making of world dominion. Into the English migration to America also entered other factors besides trade and conquest. Undoubtedly the political motive, though perhaps even it had economic roots, was a potent element in the colonization of the Atlantic seaboard, transferring the dynastic and national rivalries of the Old World to the New. 15 Grudges and ambitions that might have flamed up and burnt out on European battlefields now spread round the earth and precipitated contests for dominion in the four quarters of the globe. The settlement of Virginia under the English flag was, among other things, an act of defiance, directed against the sovereigns of Spain and Portugal to whom Pope Alexander VI had assigned the American continents. In no relation can the religious motive in English expansion be neglected without doing violence to the record, even though dynastic and economic elements were mingled with the operations of Protestant missionaries as they sought to bring Indians into their own fold and to check the extension of papal authority. The first duty of Virginians, declared Captain Smith, was to “preach, baptise into the Christian religion, and by the propagation of the Gospel to recover out of the arms of the devil, a number of poor and miserable souls wrapt up unto death in almost invincible ignorance.” Still more significant in English expansion than the work of preachers in quest of souls to save were the labors of laymen from the religious sects of every variety who fled to the wilderness in search of a haven all their own. Thus it must be said that as faith in Mahomet inspired the armies that carried forward the scimitar under the crescent, threatening to subdue three continents, so faith in Christ inspired the missionaries who served with the forerunners of expanding Europe and mingled with the hopes and passions of the colonists who subdued the waste places of the New World to the economy and culture of the Old. And to this religious motive must be added the love of adventure, curiosity about the unknown, forced sale into slavery, the spirit of liberty beckoning from the frontiers of civilization, the whip of the law, and the fierce, innate restlessness which seizes uncommon people in rebellion against the monotonous routine of ordered life. Among the movements that have scattered the human race far and wide over the surface of the earth, the English migration to America was in one fundamental respect unique. Spain, like Rome, conquered and exploited, but the English, by force of circumstances, were driven into another line of expansion. They had no less lust for gold than had the Spanish, but the geographical area which fell into their hands at first did not yield the precious treasure. They would have rejoiced to find, overcome, and exploit an ancient American civilization —another Mexico or Peru; their work in India revealed the willingness of the spirit and flesh; and 16 yet in the economy of history this was not to be their fate in the New World. Instead of natives submissive to servitude, instead of old civilizations ripe for conquest, the English found an immense continent of virgin soil and forest, sparsely settled by primitive peoples who chose death rather than bondage. To this continent the English colonial leaders, like the Greeks in expansion, transported their own people, their own economy, and the culture of the classes from which they sprang, reproducing in a large measure the civilization of the mother country. Unlike the Spaniards and other empire builders, the English succeeded in founding a new state, which became vast in extent, independent in government, and basically European in stock. That achievement is one of the capital facts of world history. How did it happen that the English, who came late upon the imperial scene, alone among the European powers achieved just this result ? It was certainly not because they were first in the arts of exploration, war, and colonization. Far from it; the Italians were the pathfinders of the high sea. Three hundred years before the English ventured from their little island home to plant colonies in Virginia, Italian mariners had sailed out through the Straits of Gibraltar, and down the coast of Africa in search of a water route to the fabled markets of the East. It was an Italian, Christopher Columbus, who unfurled the flag of Spain above a motley crew of many nationalities and made the fateful voyage of 1492 that discovered America. It was a Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope with the banner of Portugal flying at his mast-head, visited the markets of India, and brought back treasure and tales that filled all Europe with commotions. Before a single English sea captain dared the wide Atlantic, the impetuous Spaniard held in fee the West Indies, ruled huge empires on two American continents, and laid claims to fair domains in the Orient. More than half a century before Francis Drake bore Queen Elizabeth’s pennant round the world, the expedition of the indomitable Portuguese, Magellan, under Spanish patronage, on the most perilous voyage in the annals of the sea, had circumnavigated the globe. When Henry VII, stirring from his insular lethargy for a brief moment, bethought himself in 1497 of high adventure beyond the Atlantic, it was an Italian, John Cabot, who took charge of the king’s ships, directed the voyage that skirted the shores of Labrador, and gave England her lawyer’s claim to the North American continent. 17 Three years previous to the planting of the first successful English post in America at Jamestown, the French had established a permanent colony at Port Royal on the banks of the Annapolis. Long before a single English ship had plowed the waters of the Indian Ocean or threaded its way among the spice islands of the golden East, the resolute Dutch had visited a hundred Indian ports, established trading factories, and planted the outposts of empire. Slowly indeed did the idea dawn in the minds of Englishmen that, while other nations might carry goods, religion, culture, and the sword across the ocean, they themselves could found great states, occupied and governed mainly by people of their own stock. The success of the English in this form of colonial enterprise was due to many factors of circumstance and policy. Their insular position freed them from the expense of maintaining a large army and required them to put their money into a navy for protection. The ships which protected them, unlike armies, could sail the . seven seas, seize distant territories, and defend broad dominions. Early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, English statesmen saw with half an eye the sign of the sea power. They did not evolve a grand scheme such as Captain Alfred Mahan, long after the deeds, formulated in a coherent and cogent theory of words, but they discovered that lands beyond the seas could be permanently held only by a sovereign who also ruled the waves. Acting on that understanding they laid the foundations of the navy which struck down the Spaniards in the battle of the Armada in 1588, the Dutch in a long series of conflicts, the French in two hundred years of warfare, and at last, in the fullness of time, the Germans who grasped for the trident. It was through the sea power that England was able to seize and hold the geographical theaters for her commercial and colonial empire. Rivalries and jealousies of the continental states likewise served England’s imperial fortune. Slowly, through their endless strife with rulers on the other side of the Channel, English statesmen worked out a flexible system known as “the balance of power,” which made for safety at home and dominion in America, Asia, and Africa. With a skill that was a marvel to the seasoned chancelleries of Europe, they played the Dutch against the French, the French against the Dutch, the Prussians against the French, and the French against the Prussians. By such means the governments of Europe that singly or in combination might have defied England on the sea were worn down to wrathful impotence. Dutch soldiers allied with England 18 sent to their graves thousands of Louis XIV’s best men who, if they had lived, might have built securely the groundwork of a French state in Canada. The power of France that might have grasped India was broken by the shock of Frederick the Great’s picked Prussian troops on the battlefields of Europe. The political condition of the Continent, as well as its undying rivalries, was another factor that favored English colonial success. In the seventeenth century, all eastern Europe was landlocked and slumbering in ancient customs or engaged in local conflicts that had little or no bearing on trade and empire. Central Europe —the geographical region now occupied by Germany, Austria, Italy, and a number of minor states— was in chaos. Germany was an aggregation of petty feudal domains from whic