this country, and in some regions they formed no small percentage of the population. There were friends of the struggling colonists in England, leaders in Parliament who openly espoused their cause, and counted their victory in America a necessary safeguard for the cause of liberty in England. The war was a struggle of party with party, of the party holding liberal principles in both countries with the conservative upholders of arbitrary government in both.

The majority in America had sore need of the help of the minority in England. The achievement of independence was a desperate enterprise. It was not, however, one whit more desperate than the work of construction which was undertaken immediately afterward. Men who had no special motive to prophesy evil declared at the time that such diverse political units as were the colonies, scattered along such an extent of territory, could by no possibility be compacted into a stable government. That the task should have been successfully achieved shows that there were statesmen in the field quite above the rank of the ordinary manufacturers of paper constitutions. In truth, the nation which blesses the Divine Providence that gave a Washington and others to lead through the smoke and din of battle may well pour out equal thanksgiving for the Madison, the Hamilton, the Washington and others who, in the time of peace, wrought out the Federal Constitution and secured its adoption. No single group of statesmen in any country has ever reared a nobler monument of political wisdom.

That the unique structure, however, had one serious blemish was not hid even from those by whose hands it

was shaped. They reluctantly admitted the blemish because they considered it impossible otherwise to unite the colonies into a single nation. Thus resulted the compromise with slavery, a postponing of trouble to fall in tenfold volume upon a later generation, which may have had, however, more than tenfold strength to bear the ordeal.

To one who knows how firm a hold slavery had upon. the whole South before the middle of this century, a surprise can hardly fail to come, as he reads for the first time the numerous declarations and protests against it which were put on record at the close of the colonial period.

The traffic in human flesh had indeed been practised with little compunction in all the colonies. It was recognized in their several statute-books. Rhode Island, it is true, passed a law in 1652 limiting the enslavement of negroes, as well as of other bondmen, to a period of ten years. But it cannot be said that the law was steadily enforced. The northern colonies as well as the southern had their slaves, though in much smaller numbers in proportion to their population. For any colony to have excluded African bondmen would have been in direct contravention of the will of the mother country. It was a favorite item in the mercantile policy of England to keep an open slave market in her American dependencies. Even before the famous clause, the so-called asiento, in the treaty of Utrecht (1713) had given her a relative monopoly of the slave traffic, she would not tolerate a legislative restriction of it in any province under the crown. Of course after the enormous extension of the traffic had fostered a correspond

ing greed, she was still less inclined to admit restriction. It was but a continuation of the policy which had been. pursued in the preceding years when in 1770 the King sent an instruction to the Governor of Virginia, commanding him, " upon pain of the highest displeasure, to assent to no law by which the importation of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed." 1

This governmental fostering of an inhuman traffic had begun, not far from the date of the above instruction, to provoke criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the colonies there was a marked quickening of conscience on the subject, beginning near the middle of the century, when the Quakers inaugurated their effective opposition to slavery, and showing tokens of increasing vitality till the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. In the northern colonies the small profit of the institution provided a favorable ground for the spread of the moral antipathy against it which some of the more generous and thoughtful minds entertained. In this quarter, therefore, the struggle for independence was the signal for the legal abolition of slavery. The same era of enlarged thought upon the essential rights of men called forth also many adverse comments on the system of human bondage from the southern communities. The leading statesmen of Virginia - Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, and Washington-all spoke against it, some of them in very positive terms. Jefferson denounced it in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, and afterwards characterized it in terms which might wellnigh have satisfied the zeal of the typical abolitionist. 1 Bancroft, History of the United States, iii. 410.

The first assembly of colonial representatives, in 1774, passed a resolution against the further importation of slaves, and in 1787 the proposition to exclude slavery from the northwestern territories received the assent of all the southern States. In fact only two States, South Carolina and Georgia, seem to have been at that time thoroughly wedded to slavery.1 But for the necessity of conciliating them, it is probable that no recognition of this form of human oppression would have been allowed to mar the constitution of the republic.2

II.

THE COLONIES IN THEIR RELATIONS TO THE NATIVES.

A large part of America, at the time of its discovery, was comparatively uninhabited. The West India islands

1 For sixteen years negro slavery was excluded from Georgia. The motive for the regulation may have been considerations of prudence as well as humanitarian zeal. At any rate, shortly after the repeal of the restriction, the slave code of Georgia indicated very little tenderness for the bondman. A slave could be put to death for burning a stack of rice or barrel of pitch. Striking a white person entailed the same penalty in case of a third offence, or even for a first offence if the assault resulted in a grievous wound. Teaching slaves to write was strictly prohibited.

2 Some of the principal works consulted in connection with the English colonies are the following: Bancroft, History of the United States; Narrative and critical History of America, edited by Justin Winsor; Palfrey, History of New England; C. W. Elliott, The New England History; S. G. Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island; J. R. Brodhead, History of the State of New York; J. T. Scharf, History of Maryland; E. D. Neill, The Colonization of America, The Founders of Maryland, and Virginia Carolorum; F. L. Hawks, History of North Carolina; C. C. Jones, History of Georgia; John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England; also, the Critical Period of American History; J. A. Doyle, The English in America.

had in proportion to their extent a considerable population. Mexico, a part of Central America, and Peru were well-occupied regions, containing probably an aggregate of several millions of people. But north of Mexico any great mass of inhabitants was nowhere to be found. The broad prairie region was almost untenanted. We should be making no illiberal estimate if we should reckon the whole number of Indians north of the present Mexican border as not exceeding half a million at the time that the English and the French began their settlements.1

1 Speaking of the region of the United States east of the Mississippi, George Bancroft says: "We shall approach, and perhaps rather exceed, a just estimate of their numbers at the spring-time of English colonization if to the various tribes of the Algonkin race we allow about ninety thousand; of the eastern Dakotas less than three thousand; of the Iroquois, including their southern kindred, about seventeen thousand; of the Catawbas, three thousand; of the Cherokees, twelve thousand; of the Mobilian confederacies and tribes, — that is, of the Chicasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks, including the Seminoles, fifty thousand; of the Uchees, one thousand; of the Natchez four thousand; in all, it may be not far from one hundred and eighty thousand souls." (History of the United States, ii. 100.) L. H. Morgan adds the comment: "This is as large a number as our information will justify. There is not the slightest reason for supposing that they ever exceeded that number." (Indian Migrations, in Beach's Indian Miscellany.) "M. de la Joncaire, in 1736, drew up for the information of the home government an official estimate of the number of fighting men among all the savage tribes then in existence between Quebec and Louisiana (that is, nearly the whole of New France), and the total he ventured to give was but 16,000.” (Garneau, History of Canada, i. 121.) Morgan, on the basis of reports from the Spanish explorers, concludes that the Pueblo (or village) Indians in New Mexico and its neighborhood numbered, near the middle of the sixteenth century, about fifty thousand. (Indian Migrations.) The Spanish missionaries, in 1802 estimated the California Indians at a little over thirtytwo thousand. (Ibid.) In 1857 Sir George Simpson reckoned the Indian population of British America east of the Rocky Mountains at sixty-seven thousand, and those west of the mountains at eighty thousand. (Ibid.)