Chapter XXI.

 “For thee they fought, for thee they fell,
  And their oath was on thee laid;
  To thee the clarions raised their swell,
  And the dying warriors pray’d.”

  Percival.

The distaste for each other which existed between the people of New England and those of the adjoining colonies, anterior to the war of the revolution, is a matter of history.  It was this feeling that threw Schuyler, one of the ablest and best men in the service of his country, into the shade, a year later than the period of which we are writing.  This feeling was very naturally produced, and, under the circumstances, was quite likely to be active in a revolution.  Although New England and New York were contiguous territories, a wide difference existed between their social conditions.  Out of the larger towns, there could scarcely be said to be a gentry at all, in the former; while the latter, a conquered province, had received the frame-work of the English system, possessing Lords of the Manor, and divers other of the fragments of the feudal system.  So great was the social equality throughout the interior of the New England provinces, indeed, as almost to remove the commoner distinctions of civilised associations, bringing all classes surprisingly near the same level, with the exceptions of the very low, or some rare instance of an individual who was raised above his neighbours by unusual wealth, aided perhaps by the accidents of birth, and the advantages of education.

The results of such a state of society are easily traced.  Habit had taken the place of principles, and a people accustomed to see even questions of domestic discipline referred, either to the church or to public sentiment, and who knew few or none of the ordinary distinctions of social intercourse, submitted to the usages of other conditions of society, with singular distaste and stubborn reluctance.  The native of New England deferred singularly to great wealth, in 1776 as he is known to defer to it to-day; but it was opposed to all his habits and prejudices to defer to social station.  Unused to intercourse with what was then called the great world of the provinces, he knew not how to appreciate its manners or opinions; and, as is usual with the provincial, he affected to despise that which he neither practised nor understood.  This, at once, indisposed him to acknowledge the distinctions of classes; and, when accident threw him into the adjoining province, he became marked, at once, for decrying the usages he encountered, comparing them, with singular self-felicitation, to those he had left behind him; sometimes with justice beyond a doubt, but oftener in provincial ignorance and narrow bigotry.

A similar state of things, on a larger scale, has been witnessed, more especially in western New York, since the peace of ’83; the great inroads of emigrants from the New England states having almost converted that district of country into an eastern colony.  Men of the world, while they admit how much has been gained in activity, available intelligence of the practical school, and enterprise, regret that the fusion has been quite so rapid and so complete; it being apparently a law of nature that nothing precious that comes of man shall be enjoyed altogether without alloy.