History,
biography, eulogy, are flourishing. The reader is reminded of
that epoch, one hundred and fifty years later, when the deaths of
John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson, falling upon the same
anniversary day, the Fourth of July, 1826, stirred all Americans
to a fresh recognition of the services wrought by the Fathers of
the Republic. So it was in the colonies at the close of the
seventeenth century. Old England, in one final paroxysm of
political disgust, cast out the last Stuart in 1688. That
Revolution marks, as we have seen, the close of a long and tragic
struggle which began in the autocratic theories of James the
First and in the absolutism of Charles. Almost every phase of
that momentous conflict had its reverberation across the
Atlantic, as the history of the granting and withdrawal of
colonial charters witnesses abundantly. The American pioneers
were quite aware of what was going on in England, and they
praised God or grumbled, thriftily profited by the results or
quietly nullified them, as the case might be. But all the time,
while England was rocked to its foundations, the colonists struck
steadily forward into their own independent life.
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