CHAPTER II.

Of the Civil Institutions of the Colonists, and their Political Relatums with the Mother Country.

THE annals of our country do not furnish those brilliant transactions or vicissitudes, which animate the narrations of the historian or which rouse and keep alive the admiration of the reader. Its original occurences have not yet acquired the reverence of age; they are likewise unattended by those marvellous events, by which, the chronicles of nations that are lost in the mazes of antiquity or ignorance are usually diversified and distinguished.

The Greeks, to enliven the dull scenes of their infant story, clad their sturdy ancestors in the skins of wild beasts, fed them upon acorns, and traced them to their subterraneous caverns; or, to supply the barrenness of incidents, sent forth, in the armour of invincibility, a Hercules or a Theseus to combat the fa

bled monsters of the desert. The Romans, to gratify their national pride, traced their genealogy to the gods, and enlisted the interests of heaven in the foundation of their mighty empire. The historians of modern Europe have used this license, which the same obscurity of origin affords them, with no less genius and ingenuity. They have amused or overwhelmed us with the details of ravage and devastation which outstrip the fury of the tempest, or exceed in terror the convulsions of the earthquake. Those savage tribes, which shrunk, in the forests of Germany, from the tenth legion of Cæsar, are magnified to a nation of heroes; and myriads of barbarians nourished amidst the uncultivated and barren regions of the north, have been set loose, by the prolific fancy of these writers, in massacre and havoc, upon the civilized world.

But the history of the origin of our country is not less instructive, though less amusing, by being limited to the simplicity of truth. In this dreary region, the American citizen is to investigate the principles of his existing laws, or to trace to their elements the institutions of his liberty, and observe by what cultivation and care of his ancestors, the seeds of his independence have grown up and ripened into maturity. He derives, at the same time, from their example, from their virtues and errors those salutary lessons

of instruction, upon which depends the duration of his political freedom. For, by the same arts, by which liberty is vindicated, it must be propagated and maintained. And no people are perhaps so prone to become the instruments of tyranny, or sink with more headlong precipitation into the abyss of corruption than those who have lived under the institutions of a republic. Under the dominion of a foreign prince, a priest holds the sceptre of the Cæsars; the subjects of a despot are seated upon the sacred ashes of Sparta.

Having, in the preceding chapter, enumerated the principal causes which induced the first settlement of the colonies, with such remarks as were thought most pertinent to illustrate the character of the inhabitants, the design of the present and succeeding ones is to treat concisely of their civil institutions and the political relations that subsisted between them and the mother country, the wars they achieved, and the spirit with which they sustained them.

A right of possession over the territories of the new world was assumed amongst the sovereigns of Europe by preoccupancy or priority of discovery. By some it was derived from the munificence of the pope, who asserted a divine right to these unappropriated regions of the earth, as representative of heaven. On the former of these titles, the king of England estab

lished his dominions in America. The lands of this vast country were considered as the exclusive property of the crown, placed without the precincts of the realm and exempt from parliamentary jurisdiction or control. They were apportioned by the royal authority, and confered successively upon corporations and individuals, to be held by them under the denomination of proprietors, and in subordination to the king only as their supreme sovereign and lord.

Such an appropriation of these territories, was not founded upon any principle of human reason or justice, but upon the tyrannical doctrine of the feudal tenures, introduced by the Norman conquest, and which, at this period, was a fiction even in English law," that the king is the universal lord and original proprietor of all the lands in his kingdom." The colonists, whose occupancy and personal labour had given to themselves the most justifiable right to this country, entertaining but general notions of property and little skilled in the niceties of law, unconsciously admitted in their first settlements this extension of the feudal system, and acquiesced in the absurd title of their monarch. By usage it was ripened into an established prerogative, and was employed, in various instances, by an exorbitant increase of the price of land or a refusal of the petitions for it, to arrest