CHAPTER V.
BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH.
Indian corn.
Importance of Smith's work.
Of late years there has been some discussion as to which of the flowers or plants indigenous to the New World might most properly be selected as a national emblem for the United States of America, and many persons have expressed a preference for that most beautiful of cereals, Indian corn. Certainly it would be difficult to overrate the historic importance of this plant. Of the part which it played in aboriginal America I have elsewhere treated.[80] To the first English settlers it was of vital consequence. But for Indian corn the company of Pilgrims at Plymouth would have succumbed to famine, like so many other such little colonies. The settlers at Jamestown depended upon corn from the outset, and when the supply stopped the Starving Time came quickly. We can thus appreciate the value to the Pilgrims of the alliance with Massasoit, and to the Virginians of the amicable relations for some time maintained with The Powhatan. We are also furnished with the means of estimating the true importance of John Smith and his work in the first struggle of English civilization with the wilderness. Whether we suppose that Smith in his writings unduly exalts his own work or not, one thing is clear. It is impossible to read his narrative without recognizing the hand of a man supremely competent to deal with barbarians. No such character as that which shines out through his pages could ever have been invented. To create such a man by an effort of imagination would have been far more difficult than to be such a man. One of the first of Englishmen to deal with Indians, he had no previous experience to aid him; yet nowhere have the red men been more faithfully portrayed than in his pages, and one cannot fail to note this unrivalled keenness of observation, which combined with rare sagacity and coolness to make him always say and do the right things at the right times. These qualities kept the Indians from hostility and made them purveyors to the needs of the little struggling colony.
Nobility of his nature.
Besides these qualities Smith had others which marked him out as a natural leader of men. His impulsiveness and plain speaking, as well as his rigid enforcement of discipline, made him some bitter enemies, but his comrades in general spoke of him in terms of strong admiration and devotion. His nature was essentially noble, and his own words bear witness to it, as in the following exhortation: "Seeing we are not born for ourselves, but each to help other, and our abilities are much alike at the hour of our birth and the minute of our death; seeing our good deeds and our bad, by faith in Christ's merits, is all we have to carry our souls to heaven or to hell; seeing honour is our lives' ambition, and our ambition after death to have an honourable memory of our life; and seeing by no means we would be abated of the dignities and glories of our predecessors, let us imitate their virtues to be worthily their successors." So wrote the man of whom Thomas Fuller quaintly said that he had "a prince's heart in a beggar's purse," and to whom one of his comrades, a survivor of the Starving Time, afterward paid this touching tribute: "Thus we lost him that in all our proceedings made justice his first guide, ... ever hating baseness, sloth, pride, and indignity more than any dangers; that never allowed more for himself than his soldiers with him; that upon no danger would send them where he would not lead them himself; that would never see us want what he either had or could by any means get us; that would rather want than borrow, or starve than not pay; that loved action more than words, and hated falsehood and covetousness worse than death; whose adventures were our lives and whose loss our deaths."[81]
But for Smith the colony would probably have perished.