James:  What you say, minister, seems very true:  do go on:  I always love to hear you talk.

Minister:  Don’t you think, neighbour James, that the mind of a good and enlightened Englishman would be more improved in remarking throughout these provinces the causes which render so many people happy?  In delineating the unnoticed means by which we daily increase the extent of our settlements?  How we convert huge forests into pleasing fields, and exhibit through these thirteen provinces so singular a display of easy subsistence and political felicity.

In Italy all the objects of contemplation, all the reveries of the traveller, must have a reference to ancient generations, and to very distant periods, clouded with the mist of ages.—­Here, on the contrary, everything is modern, peaceful, and benign.  Here we have had no war to desolate our fields:  [Footnote:  The troubles that now convulse the American colonies had not broke out when this and some of the following letters were written.] our religion does not oppress the cultivators:  we are strangers to those feudal institutions which have enslaved so many.  Here nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of new comers, and to supply them with food.  I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome.  Here everything would inspire the reflecting traveller with the most philanthropic ideas; his imagination, instead of submitting to the painful and useless retrospect of revolutions, desolations, and plagues, would, on the contrary, wisely spring forward to the anticipated fields of future cultivation and improvement, to the future extent of those generations which are to replenish and embellish this boundless continent.  There the half-ruined amphitheatres, and the putrid fevers of the Campania, must fill the mind with the most melancholy reflections, whilst he is seeking for the origin and the intention of those structures with which he is surrounded, and for the cause of so great a decay.  Here he might contemplate the very beginnings and outlines of human society, which can be traced nowhere now but in this part of the world.  The rest of the earth, I am told, is in some places too full, in others half depopulated.  Misguided religion, tyranny, and absurd laws everywhere depress and afflict mankind.  Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species; our laws are simple and just, we are a race of cultivators, our cultivation is unrestrained, and therefore everything is prosperous and flourishing.  For my part I had rather admire the ample barn of one of our opulent farmers, who himself felled the first tree in his plantation, and was the first founder of his settlement, than study the dimensions of the temple of Ceres.  I had rather record the progressive steps of this industrious farmer, throughout all the stages of his labours and other operations, than examine how modern Italian convents can be supported without doing anything but singing and praying.