systems of more perfect civil liberty, or to enjoy a higher degree of religious freedom.  Above all, there was nothing in the religion and learning of the age, that could either inspire high purposes, or give the ability to execute them.  Whatever restraints on civil liberty, or whatever abuses in religious worship, existed at the time of our fathers’ emigration, yet even then all was light in the moral and mental world, in comparison with its condition in most periods of the ancient states.  The settlement of a new continent, in an age of progressive knowledge and improvement, could not but do more than merely enlarge the natural boundaries of the habitable world.  It could not but do much more even than extend commerce and increase wealth among the human race.  We see how this event has acted, how it must have acted, and wonder only why it did not act sooner, in the production of moral effects, on the state of human knowledge, the general tone of human sentiments, and the prospects of human happiness.  It gave to civilized man not only a new continent to be inhabited and cultivated, and new seas to be explored; but it gave him also a new range for his thoughts, new objects for curiosity, and new excitements to knowledge and improvement.

Roman colonization resembled, far less than that of the Greeks, the original settlements of this country.  Power and dominion were the objects of Rome, even in her colonial establishments.  Her whole exterior aspect was for centuries hostile and terrific.  She grasped at dominion, from India to Britain, and her measures of colonization partook of the character of her general system.  Her policy was military, because her objects were power, ascendency, and subjugation.  Detachments of emigrants from Rome incorporated themselves with, and governed, the original inhabitants of conquered countries.  She sent citizens where she had first sent soldiers; her law followed her sword.  Her colonies were a sort of military establishment; so many advanced posts in the career of her dominion.  A governor from Rome ruled the new colony with absolute sway, and often with unbounded rapacity.  In Sicily, in Gaul, in Spain, and in Asia, the power of Rome prevailed, not nominally only, but really and effectually.  Those who immediately exercised it were Roman; the tone and tendency of its administration, Roman.  Rome herself continued to be the heart and centre of the great system which she had established.  Extortion and rapacity, finding a wide and often rich field of action in the provinces, looked nevertheless to the banks of the Tiber, as the scene in which their ill-gotten treasures should be displayed; or, if a spirit of more honest acquisition prevailed, the object, nevertheless, was ultimate enjoyment in Rome itself.  If our own history and our own times did not sufficiently expose the inherent and incurable evils of provincial government, we might see them portrayed, to our amazement, in the desolated and ruined provinces of the Roman empire.  We might hear them, in a voice that terrifies us, in those strains of complaint and accusation, which the advocates of the provinces poured forth in the Roman Forum:—­“Quas res luxuries in flagitiis, crudelitas in suppliciis, avaritia in rapinis, superbia in contumeliis, efficere potuisset, eas omnes sese pertulisse.”