1700-76] The eighteenth century.

Jonathan Edwards

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fits the case. It may be said, of course, that God is uncommonly kind to a particular neighbourhood; but it is simpler to say that Calvin was mistaken about the extreme depravity of men. And this is the view which Americans, on the whole, have been disposed to take.

Cotton Mather was by no means wholly a man of the past. Though his principles in religion and in politics were what he believed those of the New England Fathers to be, he found time, in his wonderfully busy life, for much scientific and other observation. His letters on various phases of natural history in America won him recognition from the Royal Society; and he supposed himself fully entitled to the dignity of F.R.S. Towards the end of his life he introduced at Boston the practice of inoculation for the small-pox, which is said not to have been attempted previously in the British dominions. A conventional seventeenth century scholar, he felt, nevertheless, the impulse of the newer learning which was to distinguish later centuries. To this he contributed certain unimportant facts. He never approached, however, a scientific generalisation; and his chief scientific achievement was that medical one in which he applied to practical use the result of his omnivorous reading. In this aspect he foreshadowed the America which was to follow him. Americans have observed well; they have made a great many useful and practical inventions; but to this day pure science would be little poorer without them.

So far as seventeenth century America expressed itself, its intellectual energy was concentrated in New England, and was chiefly devoted to Calvinistic theology. In the following century the state of things was different. New England, to be sure, still remained the centre of theological activity. It produced, in Jonathan Edwards, the man who may still be held the most eminent of American theologians. As one considers the unflinching logic of his Calvinism, however, there is an aspect of it more noteworthy than its courage and its technical excellence. This is its remoteness from actual experience. The earlier Puritans had accepted with all their hearts a creed which explained to their satisfaction the confusion and the wickedness of human life. Edwards, turning his eyes from all things of this world, and seeking, like the true Yankee that he was, for the truths which lie beyond the limits of human experience, devoted all his energy to reasoning out extreme conclusions involved in the faith which he had accepted from the Fathers. Unlike the eminent ministers of earlier days, he concerned himself hardly at all with public affairs. His career, accordingly, marks at once the tendency of American theology to depart from experience in its search for ideal truth, and the tendency of American life to separate the things of this world from those of the next. The elder divines were practical and often skilful politicians; the diplomatic achievement of Increase Mather, in securing the Provincial Charter of Massachusetts, was almost as remarkable as the later diplomatic career of Franklin. Edwards, on

730 Eighteenth century Politics: the Revolution [1700

the other hand, the most eminent American divine of his time, had nothing to do with any form of politics. No life could exemplify more clearly than his a complete separation of Church and State.

It was chiefly in affairs of State that eighteenth century America was noteworthy. Just at the end of the third quarter of the century came the most critical event in American history-the Revolution which resulted in national independence. The more one considers this stupendous imperial disruption, the more puzzling it appears. There was no tyranny on the part of Great Britain so galling as to account for the passionate revolt of America or to justify the blatant traditions of Fourth of July oratory. Yet, beyond question, the revolt of America was not only passionate but deeply sincere. To understand it, we must recall the facts that the national life of America parted from that of England not in the time of George III but early in the reign of Charles I; that the traditions of America had their origin in Elizabethan England; and that, apart from other considerations, the British Parliament attained to predominance in the State only at a time when the American colonies had already developed working constitutions of their own. Of this traditional system in America no feature was more marked than that which established the custom that a representative to any legislative assembly should not only be elected by the constituency he represented, but should actually be resident among them. No single fact could more clearly typify the divergence of constitutional practice in America from that of England, sixty years before the Reform Bill. Each country, in brief, had its own political traditions; and those of each were consecrated by customs which extended far beyond the range of human memory. Furthermore, the mutual misunderstandings bound to arise from such divergences were emphasised by the growing differences of national temper due to the fact that, in general character, America had changed so little, while England had changed so much, since the early days of colonial settlement.

Though the first important conflicts of the Revolution occurred in Massachusetts, the revolutionary sentiment pervaded all the colonies, and was most memorably expressed in those further south. The Adamses were Massachusetts men; but Franklin, though born in Boston, was an almost lifelong resident of Pennsylvania; Hamilton was of New York; and Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were of Virginia. From Virginia, most of all, came the utterances on which the political temper of America has subsequently been based. The Declaration of Independence was written by Jefferson's hand. To understand this newly evident phase of American temper, we must glance for an instant at the development of other regions than New England. In brief, these had been colonised not for religious but for secular purposes; and the energies of their inhabitants had been chiefly devoted to success in things of this world. Such an object requires a fairly settled state of

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Legal training and its results

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law. In early colonial days there were few lawyers; and, at the outset, no locally established customs. Before long, customs began to assert themselves; in a generation or two, these had become established. The Courts, which gave them the sanction of formal law, were then composed not of trained jurists but of men resembling in general rather the justices of the peace than the judges of England. As a class they were persons of vigorous sense and upright character; they were confronted with the nominal duty of administering the law of England, and accordingly informed themselves concerning it as well as they could by means of treatises and books of legal forms; but, in reality, their duty was to establish in their own remote country a legal system which should secure them the rights of life, of property, and, so far as might be, of liberty. Thus there grew up among them a habit of assuming that the practical customs of their country were really based on abstract legal principles, concerning which, now and again, they discoursed and disputed with far more freedom than would have been the case in a country where lawyers and legislators had been especially trained for their careers. From the nature of affairs, any man of position and of intelligence was apt to find himself charged with duties which compelled him, in some degree, to assume the character of a jurist and of a legal thinker; he might at any moment be called to a position in which he would be expected to assert not only the actual state of the law, but the reasons for it.

When we remember that these conditions originated in the reign of Charles I; when we recall the tendency of England at that time to the assertion of general political principles - a tendency never so evident there after the collapse of the Commonwealth; and when, furthermore, we remind ourselves of the comparative stability of American social conditions, we shall feel less wonder than sometimes arises when we are confronted with the political philosophers of the American Revolution. They were in truth the successors of generations who had been compelled to administer a new system of customary law, and to defend and support it by reference to principles and authorities which had developed under conditions widely different from their own. They had grown so accustomed to the assertion of abstract legal and political principles, derived from their occasional reading and study, that they instinctively welcomed the delusively simple and alluring generalisations of fashionable French philosophy. Yet, all the while, they never dreamed of letting general principles, however fascinating, interfere with the state of legal custom on which the stability of their society depended. They had learned, to a degree which has not been understood, the practical lesson that life cannot be conducted on abstract principles. In practical matters their good sense was remarkable. Yet they never quite understood the actual divergence between their preaching and their practice. At heart, they had an instinctive, uncritical faith in their

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Benjamin Franklin

[1700own integrity. They held certain beliefs; they conducted themselves. in certain ways; and they were certainly themselves. It seemed indisputably to follow that their beliefs and their conduct must be consistent. Emerson was more American than he knew when he proclaimed that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Among the Americans of the eighteenth century, the most eminent was probably Franklin; and in many ways his character was typical both of his country and of his time. As the isolation of Edwards had indicated, theology was no longer a dominant force in the American colonies. The growth of the colonies inevitably forced questions of this world on the attention of the people. This was true not only in matters of politics and law, but still more in the conduct of private affairs and the business of daily life. Of the various proofs of Franklin's commonsense which are furnished by the reading of his letters and other works, none makes a more deep and lasting impression than the cool decision with which he recognised this state of affairs. He was far removed from atheism; on the other hand, he could see no reason for troubling himself about the problems of theology. He found himself placed in a world where he was free to win his honest way from obscurity to a distinction which gives colour to the contention that on the whole he was the most successful man of his century; the affairs of this world, the questions which inevitably arose concerning the relations of men with one another and with physical nature, seemed to him enough for any human being. If a man did his best, intellectually and morally, he need have no fear of God; for the angels can do no more. And Franklin did his best — as printer, as shopkeeper, as practical moralist, as scientific observer, as inventor, citizen, diplomatist, statesman. It was his study of electricity which won him most recognition as a man of science. Yet, on the whole, what seems chiefly to have interested him in this respect was his invention of the lightning-rod, so long believed to be a protection against the fiercest danger which can fall from the skies. His other scientific studies were apt, in the same way, to result in practical inventions, made rather for the benefit of humanity than from any consideration of mere personal advantage. The Franklin stove-an iron fireplace advanced a few inches in front of the old gaping chimneys — added more to the comfort of American life than words can tell; for more than half the heat which had escaped up the wide chimney-throat was saved to do service.

In science, as in public life, this Franklin, calmly facing whatever question presented itself, tried to solve it or to measure it in the most broadly sensible way. Philosopher as he was, he troubled himself so little about ideals and abstractions that, paradoxically enough, his Americanism seems a little short of that which should most broadly have characterised his country. On the practical side he left nothing to be desired; he was constantly willing and eager to adapt himself, and to urge that others should adapt themselves, to the conditions of life by

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State of law in the eighteenth century

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which they were surrounded. As a reasoner, whether dealing with others or communing with himself, he was vigorous, honest, and so shrewd that the expanse of his common-sense extended to the verge of genius. In versatile rationality he never had a superior. But, on the whole, he never quite completed his typical nationality by such sympathetic understanding of ideal philosophy as underlay both the theological abstractions of Edwards and the political generalisations of the statesmen of the Revolution. In that eighteenth century America, in which the independent life of the United States had its origin, the older fusion of ideals and of practical conduct had evidently begun to give way.

The aspects of American character on which we have now touched may be taken, on the whole, as comprehensive. Edwards typifies the older theology, divorced from life as Church and State began to trend apart, but still vigorous in that intensity of idealism which had been from the beginning what it remains to-day-the true spiritual force of America. The statesmen of the Revolution show how a modified form of that same idealism could underlie schemes of legal and political conduct, which on the surface seem at odds with the ideals they are supposed to express and to justify. And finally, the consummate rationality of Franklin typifies, more admirably still, that phase of American character which, while not insensitive to the influence of pure ideals, can adapt itself and devote its energies to the advancement not of abstract science but of the practical conduct of life. The question now before us is how these national characteristics, of which we have tried to trace the origin and the development, have displayed themselves since the Revolution. This question we may conveniently consider under the separate headings of law, philosophy, literature, art, science, and education.

As we have already seen, the state of law in America, when the Revolution occurred, was peculiar. Nominally the law of England prevailed from New Hampshire to Georgia. Each of the colonies meanwhile had a legislature of its own; each had its own Courts, and had long ago begun to establish an unwritten law of its own. This unwritten law, however, was everywhere stated in terms which assumed it to be the law of England itself. Accordingly, hardly anyone, on either side of the Atlantic, understood how, under the new conditions of colonial life, a number of customs unknown in England had acquired in America the full force of constitutional sanction. This peculiar condition of affairs, which has not yet been much studied in detail, lay at the bottom of the deep mutual misunderstandings which resulted in the independence of America.

Something similar has persisted in the United States to this day. The settlement of the West, which began well before the nineteenth century, and which is hardly yet complete, has been accompanied every