The religious sects, which, in the middle ages, had been fostered by the municipal liberties of the south of France, were the harbingers of modern freedom, and had therefore been sacrificed to the inexorable feudalism of the north.  After a bloody conflict, the plebeian reformers, crushed by the merciless leaders of the military aristocracy, escaped to the highlands that divide France and Italy.  Preserving the discipline of a benevolent, ascetic morality, with the simplicity of a spiritual worship,

     “When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,”

it was found, on the progress of the Reformation, that they had by three centuries anticipated Luther and Calvin.  The hurricane of persecution, which was to have swept Protestantism from the earth, did not spare their seclusion; mothers with infants were rolled down the rocks, and the bones of martyrs scattered on the Alpine mountains.  The city of Amsterdam offered the fugitive Waldenses a free passage to America, and a welcome was prepared in New Netherland for the few who were willing to emigrate.

The persecuted of every creed and every clime were invited to the colony.  When the Protestant churches in Rochelle were razed, the Calvinists of that city were gladly admitted; and the French Protestants came in such numbers that the public documents were sometimes issued in French as well as in Dutch and English.  Troops of orphans were shipped for the milder destinies of the New World; a free passage was offered to mechanics; for “population was known to be the bulwark of every State.”  The government of New Netherland had formed just ideas of the fit materials for building a commonwealth; they desired “farmers and laborers, foreigners and exiles, men inured to toil and penury.”  The colony increased; children swarmed in every village; the advent of the year and the month of May were welcomed with noisy frolics; new modes of activity were devised; lumber was shipped to France; the whale pursued off the coast; the vine, the mulberry, planted; flocks of sheep as well as cattle were multiplied; and tile, so long imported from Holland, began to be manufactured near Fort Orange.  New Amsterdam could, in a few years, boast of stately buildings, and almost vied with Boston.  “This happily situated province,” said its inhabitants, “may become the granary of our fatherland; should our Netherlands be wasted by grievous wars, it will offer our countrymen a safe retreat; by God’s blessing, we shall in a few years become a mighty people.”

Thus did various nations of the Caucasian race assist in colonizing our central states.

D. Appleton and Company, New York.

FRANKLIN

From ‘History of the United States’