they came out, contained not a single element of popular liberty, and secured not a single right or franchise to those who lived under it. And, though a gleam of freedom seemed to dawn upon them in 1619, when they instituted a Colonial Assembly and introduced the representative system for the first time into the New World, the precarious character of their popular institutions and the slender foundation of their popular liberties at a much later period, even as far down as 1671, may be understood from that extraordinary declaration of Sir William Berkeley, then Governor of Virginia, to the Lords Commissioners:"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing- and I hope we shall not have these hundred years;- for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both."

But how was it with the Pilgrims? From a soil of comparative barrenness, they gathered a rich harvest of contentment, harmony, and happiness. Coming to it for no purpose of commerce or adventure, they found all that they sought ―religious freedom; and that made the wilderness to them like Eden, and the desert as the garden of the Lord. Of quitting it, from the very hour of their arrival, they seem never once to have entertained, or even conceived, a thought. The first foot that leapt gently but fearlessly on Plymouth Rock was a pledge that there would be no retreating,-tradition tells us that it was the foot of MARY CHILTON. They have brought their wives and their little ones with them, and what other assurance could they give that they have come to their home? And accordingly they proceed at once to invest it with all the attributes of home, and to make it a free and a happy home. The compact of their own adoption under which they landed, remained the sole guide of their government for nine years, and though it

*The distinction of being the first person that set foot on Plymouth Rock has been claimed for others beside Mary Chilton, and particularly for John Alden. But I could not resist the remark of Judge Davis on this point, in one of his notes to Morton's Memorial. After quoting the language of another, that "for the purposes of the arts a female figure, typical of faith, hope, and charity, is well adapted," he observes that," as there is a great degree of uncertainty on this subject, it is not only grateful, but allowable, to indulge the imagination, and we may expect from the friends of John Alden, that they should give place to the lady."

was then superseded by a charter from the Corporation within whose limits they had fallen, it was a charter of a liberal and comprehensive character, and under its provisions they continued to lay broad and deep the foundations of civil freedom. The trial by jury was established by the Pilgrims within three years after their arrival, and constitutes the appropriate opening to the first chapter of their legislation. The education of their children, as we have seen, was one of their main motives for leaving Holland, and there is abundant evidence that it was among the earliest subjects of their attention; while the planters of Massachusetts, who need not be distinguished from the planters of Plymouth for any purposes of this comparison, founded the college at Cambridge in 1636; set up a printing press at the same place in 1639, which "divulged," in its first workings at least, nothing more libellous or heretical than a Psalm book and an Almanac; and as early as 1647 had instituted, by an ever-memorable statute, that noble system of New England free schools, which constitutes at this moment the best security of liberty, wherever liberty exists, and its best hope, wherever it is still to be established.

It would carry me far beyond the allowable limits of this Address, if, indeed, I have not already exceeded them, to contrast, in detail, the respective influences upon our country, and, through it, upon the world, of these two original colonies. The elements for such a contrast I have already suggested, and I shall content myself with only adding further upon this point, the recent and very remarkable testimony of two most intelligent French travellers, whose writings upon the United States have justly received such distinguished notice on both sides the Atlantic.

"I have already observed," says De Tocqueville, that "the origin of the American settlements may be looked upon as the first and most efficacious cause, to which the present prosperity of the United States may be attributed. When I reflect upon the consequences of this primary circumstance, methinks, I see the destiny of America embodied in the first PURITAN who landed on these shores, just as the human race was represented by the first man."

"If we wished," says Chevalier, " to form a single type, representing the American character of the present moment as a single whole, it would be necessary to take at least three fourths of the Yankee race and to mix it with hardly one fourth of the Virginian."

But the Virginia type was not complete when it first appeared on the coast of Jamestown, and I must not omit, before bringing these remarks to a conclusion, to allude to one other element of any just comparison between the two colonies. The year 1620 was unquestionably the great epoch of American destinies. Within its latter half were included the two events which have exercised incomparably the most controlling influence on the character and fortunes of our country. At the very time the Mayflower, with its precious burden, was engaged in its perilous voyage to Plymouth, another ship, far otherwise laden, was approaching the harbor of Virginia. It was a Dutch man-ofwar, and its cargo consisted in part of twenty slaves, which were subjected to sale on their arrival, and with which the foundations of domestic slavery in North America were laid.

I see those two fate-freighted vessels, laboring under the divided destinies of the same nation, and striving against the billows of the same sea, like the principles of good and evil advancing side by side on the same great ocean of human life. I hear from the one the sighs of wretchedness, the groans of despair, the curses and clankings of struggling captivity, sounding and swelling on the same gale, which bears only from the other the pleasant voices of prayer and praise, the cheerful melody of contentment and happiness, the glad, the glorious "anthem of the free." O, could some angel arm, like that which seems to guide and guard the Pilgrim bark, be now interposed to arrest, avert, dash down, and overwhelm its accursed compeer! But it may not be. They have both reached in safety the place of their destination. Freedom and Slavery, in one and the same year, have landed on these American shores. And American liberty, like the Victor of ancient Rome, is doomed, let us hope not forever, to endure the presence of a fettered captive as a companion in her Car of Triumph!

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Gentlemen of the New England Society in the city of New York, I must detain you no longer. In preparing to discharge the duty, which you have done me the unmerited honor to assign me in the celebration of this hallowed Anniversary, I was more than once tempted to quit the narrow track of remark which I have now pursued, and to indulge in speculations or discussions of a more immediate and general interest. But it seemed to me, that if there was any day in the year which belonged of right to the past and the dead, this was that day, and to the past and the dead I resolved to devote my exclusive attention. But though I have fulfilled that resolution, as you will bear me witness, with undeviating fidelity, many of the topics which I had proposed to myself seem hardly to have been entered upon, some of them scarcely approached. The principles of the Pilgrims, the virtues of the Pilgrims, the faults of the Pilgrims -alas! there are enough always ready to make the most of these: the personal characters of their brave and pious leaders, Bradford, Brewster, Carver, Winslow, Alden, Allerton, Standish, the day shall not pass away without their names being once at least audibly and honorably pronounced:the gradual rise and progress of the colony they planted, and of the old Commonwealth with which it was early incorporated: the origin and growth of the other colonies, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and the rest, which were afterwards included within the limits of New England, and many of the sons of all of which are doubtless present here this day: history of New England as a whole, its great deeds and great men, its schools and scholars, its heroes and battle-fields, its ingenuity and industry, its soil,- hard and stony, indeed, but of inestimable richness in repelling from its culture the idle, the ignorant, and the enslaved, and in developing the energies of free, intelligent, independent labor: the influences of New England abroad as well as at home, its emigration, ever onward, with the axe in one hand and the Bible in the other, clearing out the wild growth of buckeye and hickory, and planting the trees of knowledge and of life, driving the buffalo from forest to lake, from lake to prairie, and from prairie to the sea, till the very memory of its existence would seem likely to be lost,

the

but for the noble City which its pursuers, pausing for an instant on their track, have called by its name, and founded on its favorite haunt:- these and a hundred other themes of interesting and appropriate discussion, have, I am sensible, been quite omitted. But I have already exhausted your patience, or certainly my own strength, and I hasten to relieve them both.

It has been suggested, Gentlemen, by one of the French travellers, whose opinions I have just cited, that, though the Yankee has set his mark on the United States during the last half century, and though "he still rules the nation," that yet, the physical labor of civilization is now nearly brought to an end, the physical basis of society entirely laid, and that other influences are soon about to predominate in rearing up the social superstructure of our nation. I hail the existence of this Association, and of others like it in all parts of the Union, bound together by the golden cords of "friendship, charity, and mutual assistance," as a pledge that New England principles, whether in ascendency or under depression in the nation at large, will never stand in need of warm hearts and bold tongues to cherish and vindicate them. But, at any rate, let us rejoice that they have so long pervaded the country and so long prevailed in her institutions. Let us rejoice that the basis of her society has been laid by Yankee arms. Let us rejoice that the corner-stone of our republican edifice was hewn out from the old, original, primitive, Plymouth quarry. In what remains to be done, either in finishing or in ornamenting that edifice, softer and more pliable materials may, perhaps, be preferred, — the New England granite may be thought too rough and unwieldy, the architects may condemn it, the builders may reject it, but still, still, it will remain the deep and enduring foundation, not to be removed without undermining the whole fabric. And should that fabric be destined to stand, even when bad government shall descend upon it like the rains, and corruption come round about it like the floods, and faction, discord, disunion, and anarchy blow and beat upon it like the winds, -as God grant it may stand forever! it will still owe its stability to no more effective earthly influence, than, THAT IT WAS FOUNDED ON PILGRIM ROCK.