Bacon and Locke, and Shakspeare and Milton, also came with the colonists.  It was the object of the first settlers to form new political systems, but all that belonged to cultivated man, to family, to neighborhood, to social relations, accompanied them.  In the Doric phrase of one of our own historians, “they came to settle on bare creation”; but their settlement in the wilderness, nevertheless, was not a lodgement of nomadic tribes, a mere resting-place of roaming savages.  It was the beginning of a permanent community, the fixed residence of cultivated men.  Not only was English literature read, but English, good English, was spoken and written, before the axe had made way to let in the sun upon the habitations and fields of Plymouth and Massachusetts.  And whatever may be said to the contrary, a correct use of the English language is, at this day, more general throughout the United States, than it is throughout England herself.

But another grand characteristic is, that, in the English colonies, political affairs were left to be managed by the colonists themselves.  This is another fact wholly distinguishing them in character, as it has distinguished them in fortune, from the colonists of Spain.  Here lies the foundation of that experience in self-government, which has preserved order, and security, and regularity, amidst the play of popular institutions.  Home government was the secret of the prosperity of the North American settlements.  The more distinguished of the New England colonists, with a most remarkable sagacity and a long-sighted reach into futurity, refused to come to America unless they could bring with them charters providing for the administration of their affairs in this country.[5] They saw from the first the evils of being governed in the New World by a power fixed in the Old.  Acknowledging the general superiority of the crown, they still insisted on the right of passing local laws, and of local administration.  And history teaches us the justice and the value of this determination in the example of Virginia.  The early attempts to settle that Colony failed, sometimes with the most melancholy and fatal consequences, from want of knowledge, care, and attention on the part of those who had the charge of their affairs in England; and it was only after the issuing of the third charter, that its prosperity fairly commenced.  The cause was, that by that third charter the people of Virginia, for by this time they deserved to be so called, were allowed to constitute and establish the first popular representative assembly which ever convened on this continent, the Virginia House of Burgesses.

The great elements, then, of the American system of government, originally introduced by the colonists, and which were early in operation, and ready to be developed, more and more, as the progress of events should justify or demand, were,—­

Escape from the existing political systems of Europe, including its religious hierarchies, but the continued possession and enjoyment of its science and arts, its literature, and its manners;