George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[459] The central will of the administration, though checked

chap XX.} 1763.

by concessions of monopolies, was neither guided by local legislatures, nor restrained by parliaments or courts of law. But France was reserved for a nobler influence in the New World, than that of propagating institutions, which in the Old World were giving up the ghost; nor had Providence set apart America for the reconstruction of the decaying framework of feudal tyranny.¹

The colonists from England brought over the forms of the government of the mother country, and the purpose of giving them a better development and a fairer career in the Western World. The French emigrants took with them only what belonged to the past, and nothing that represented modern freedom. The English emigrants retained what they called English privileges, but left behind in the parent country, English inequalities, the monarch, and nobility. and prelacy. French America was closed against even a gleam of intellectual independence; nor did it contain so much as one dissenter from the Roman Church; English America had English liberties in greater purity and with far more of the power of the people than England. Its inhabitants were self organized bodies of freeholders, pressing upon the receding forests, winning their way farther and farther forward every year, and never going back. They had schools, so that in several of the colonies there was no one to be found beyond childhood, who could not read and write; they had the printing-press, scattering among