HKB
ORIGIN OF THE ANGLO-AMERICANS AND ITS IMPORTANCE, IN RELATION TO THEIR FUTURE CONDITION.
Utility of knowing the Origin of Nations in order to understand their social Condition and their Laws.--America the only Country in which the Starting-Point of a great People has been clearly observable.--In what respects all who emigrated to British America were similar.--In what they differed.--Remark applicable to all the Europeans who established themselves on the shores of the New World.--Colonization of Virginia.--Colonization of New England.--Original Character of the first inhabitants of New England.--Their Arrival.--Their first Laws.--Their social Contract.--Penal Code borrowed from the Hebrew Legislation.--Religious Fervor.--Republican Spirit.--Intimate Union of the Spirit of Religion with the Spirit of Liberty.
After the birth of a human being, his early years are obscurely spent in the toils or pleasures of childhood. As he grows up, the world receives him, when his manhood begins, and he enters into contact with his fellows. He is then studied for the first time, and it is imagined that the germe of the vices and the virtues of his maturer years is then formed.
This, if I am not mistaken, is a great error. We must begin higher up; we must watch the infant in his mother's arms; we must see the first images which the external world casts upon the dark mirror of his mind; the first occurrences which he beholds; we must hear the first words which awaken the sleeping powers of thought, and stand by his earliest efforts, if we would understand the prejudices, the habits, and the passions, which will rule his life. The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child.
The growth of nations presents something analogous to this; they all bear some marks of their origin; and the circumstances which accompanied their birth and contributed to their rise, affect the whole term of their being.
If we were able to go back to the elements of states, and to examine the oldest monuments of their history, I doubt not that we should discover the primary cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and in short of all that constitutes what is called the national character: we should then find the explanation of certain customs which now seem at variance with prevailing manners, of such laws as conflict with established principles, and of such incoherent opinions as are here and there to be met with in society, like those fragments of broken chains which we sometimes see hanging from the vault of an edifice, and supporting nothing. This might explain the destinies of certain nations which seem borne along by an unknown force to ends of which they themselves are ignorant. But hitherto facts have been wanting to researches of this kind: the spirit of inquiry has only come upon communities in their latter days; and when they at length turned their attention to contemplate their origin, time had already obscured it, or ignorance and pride adorned it with truth-concealing fables.
America is the only country in which it has been possible to study the natural and tranquil growth of society, and where the influence exercised on the future condition of states by their origin is clearly distinguishable.