But they did not lack bigotry. They were as ready to persecute those who differed with them here as they had been at home. The last and greatest social truth, that the surest way of protecting our own liberties is by respecting those of others, was forced upon the colonists. So general had been the stimulants to emigration, that every European sect and party was represented in America. Hither came Calvinists and Lutherans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Conformists and Non-Conformists, the precise Quaker and the elegant Huguenot, those who fled from the tyranny of Louis and those who fled from the tyranny of Charles, worshippers of the Virgin and men who believed that to kneel before a crucifix was as idolatrous as to kneel before the seven-headed idols of Hindostan. These sects and parties were so equally balanced that toleration became a necessity. Seeing that they could not oppress, men were led to think oppression wrong, and toleration was exalted to a virtue. The theocratic spirit which prevailed at first passed away, and the great principle was established that governments have nothing to do with religion. It does not require much penetration to discover that a government which has unlimited power over the person and property of the citizen will not long respect the scruples of his conscience. Religious liberty gave birth to political freedom. The separation of the settlements from each other, even in the same establishment, made local provisions necessary for defence, and for the transaction of local business, and led to the division of the government.
When united action was necessary, the colonies did not attempt to reconcile their differences; they made a union for those purposes which were common to all. The general principles which were asserted during the Revolution were logical necessities of that event. It was a rebellion against an unjust exercise of power. Why unjust? For no other reason than because the Americans had an equal right with Englishmen to govern themselves. But that right must be one which was common to all men. The rebels knew this. They did not follow Burke through his labored argument to prove that the measures of the British ministry were inexpedient. They could not defend their conduct before the world upon the narrow ground of a violation of the relations between a dependency and its mother country. Those relations were not understood, and such a defence would not have been listened to. They appealed at once to the laws of God, and for their justification addressed those universal human instincts which give us our ideas of national and individual freedom. The declaration that men are created equal excited no surprise then. They believed it without a thought that it had entered the mind of a fantastic recluse in the retirement of l'Hermitage, and, in obedience to that belief, they severed the ties of tradition and kindred, exposed their homes and the lives of those whose lives were dearer to them than their own to the rage of civil war, and placed all they hoped for and everything they loved upon the perilous hazard of the sword.
At such a time Jefferson was led to the pursuit of politics. He was not in the situation of one who, in disgust at the misery which surrounds him, retires to his study, and, from the impulses of a kind heart, the dreams of poets, and the speculations of philosophers, fashions a society in which there is neither envy, anger, ambition, nor avarice, but where, amid Arcadian joys, all men live in peace and happiness. He was compelled to think because he had need to act, —to make real laws for real societies. To do this, he did not meditate upon human frailty and perfectibility; he did not attempt to frame institutions carefully graduated to suit the dissimilar dispositions, faculties, and desires of men. In the spirit with which he had observed the phenomena of Nature in order to discover the laws which produced them, he inspected the social phenomena of his country to learn the laws by which it might be governed. He studied the processes by which a few hamlets, hastily built upon a savage shore, had grown into powerful communities,—by which the heirs to centuries of bitter recollections had been made to forget the jealousies of race, the enmities of party, the bad hatred of sect, and united into one brotherhood for the accomplishment of a common and noble purpose. He took man as he found him, and believed he could govern himself because he had done so. He endeavored to give symmetry to the system which was already established. It is not strange that in this way he arrived at rules of policy, and assisted to put in operation a government, more perfectly adapted to our wants, more nicely adjusted to our strength and our weakness, giving freer opportunity to individual effort, and more firmly establishing national prosperity, better able to resist sedition or foreign assault, than any which painful toil has created, or the imaginations of the benevolent conceived, from the days of Plato to those of Fourier.
In our next number we shall allude to certain questions, raised by Mr. Randall's book, connected with the early politics of the country; and we shall likewise undertake the more pleasing task of describing the domestic life and the character of Jefferson.
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A PRISONER OF WAR.
Rügen is a small island, and its chief town is named Rügen also. They are both part of Prussia, as they were in 1807, when Prussia and France were at war. At that time Herr Grosshet was burgomaster, and a very important burgomaster, it should be understood,—taking in proof thereof Herr Grosshet's own opinion on the subject. According to the same high authority the burgomaster was also wondrously sharp; and the consequence of the burgomaster's sharpness was, that an amount of smuggling went on in the town which was simply audacious. None knew better than the burgomaster that the smuggling was audacious; scarcely a shopkeeper he knew, but laughed to his nose; but his dignity was so great, and he had made the central authority believe so strongly in him, that he could not lay a complaint; and the consequence of that was, that, though the townspeople laughed at their mayor, they would not have parted with him on any account. Not a soul in the town but knew of the smuggling, —not a soul who, publicly, was in the least aware of that illegality.
Bertha, as she was commonly called, did not positively belong to the town, but she had lived in it for sixteen years,—at the beginning of which time a very great commotion was created by her discovery, at the age of three, sitting staring on the sea-beach.
She was adopted by the town generally; for there were kind hearts in it,—as most towns have, for that matter; but she was specially adopted by Frau Klass, who took her home and straightway reared her, under the name of Bertha,—for the reason that she had once had a daughter with that name. The new Bertha in time met with a proposal from a flaxen-haired young sailor named Daniel, who left Rügen the next day with a considerably lightened heart. When the foundling had reached nineteen, three things had happened:—Dan had been away three years, and the town had given him up forever; Bertha's mother was no more; and Bertha rather found it her duty to submit to be married to the most odious of his sex, Jodoque by name,—a man who was detested by no one more heartily than by Bertha herself.
I say Bertha found it her duty to be married, and thus:—Frau Klass called Jodoque her nephew, and tried to justify a testament in Bertha's favor by suggesting to her the compensation to her nephew of marrying him. Thus Frau Klass tried to follow both her inclination and her duty, and died serenely at a great age,—assuring Bertha with her last breath that Daniel must be dead, and that Jodoque was an admirable youth, when known, and not at all poor.