CHARACTER OF COLONISTS.

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As in every family there is a leading man, and in every community a leading family, so in every American State there is a leading race or blood, which, at least in some special department, gives tone and coloring to the others. This leading race in North Carolina was, in politics and education, the Scotch-Irish. With the sturdy industry and personal thrift, caution, turbulent and rebellious disposition and hard-headed religious characteristics of the Scotch, they combined much of the generous wine of the noble Irish nature. I was a happy mixture of the miser and the spendthrift, of cool prudence and headlong rashness, of usquebaugh and poteen whisky. They were filled with all the enthusiastic longings for liberty of the one people, and all the steadfast and enduring determination to obtain and keep it of the other. Of their Scottish Presbyterian ancestors, Mr. Buckle, in his great work, the History of Civilization, gives, perhaps, the best analysis in the three chapters of his second volume devoted to Scotland in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After portraying in the most vivid colors, and with a master's hand, the extreme bigotry and narrow-mindedness, arrogance, superstition and spiritual tyranny which they exercised over all in their power, he proceeds: "Let us not be too forward in censuring the leading actors in that great crisis through which Scotland passed during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Much they did which excites our strongest aversion. But one thing they achieved which should make us honor their memory and repute them benefactors of their species.

At a most hazardous moment they kept alive the spirit of national liberty. What the nobles and the crown put in peril,

that did the clergy save. By their care the dying spark was kindled into a blaze. When the light grew dim and flickered on the altar their hands trimmed the lamp and fed the sacred flame. This is their real glory, and on this they may well repose. They were the guardians of Scotch freedom, and they stood to their trust. Where danger was they were foremost. By their sermons, by their conduct, both public and private, by the proceedings of their assemblies, by their bold and frequent attacks upon persons without regard to their rank, nay, even by the very insolence with which they treated their superiors, they stirred up the minds of men, woke them from their lethargy, formed them to habits of discussion, and excited that inquisitive and democratic spirit which is the only guarantee the people can ever possess against the tyranny of those who are set over them. This was the work of the Scotch clergy; and all hail to them who did it! It was they who taught their countrymen to scrutinize with a fearless eye the policy of their rulers. It was they who pointed the finger of scorn at kings and nobles, and laid bare the hollowness of their pretensions. They ridiculed their claims and jeered at their miseries. * The great ones of the earth they covered with contempt, and those who were above them they cast down. It is also well known that in conducting the struggle (against Charles I.) the English were greatly indebted to the Scotch, who had, moreover, the merit of being the first to lift their hand again the tyrant. what, however, is less known, but is undoubtedly true, is that both nations owe a debt they can never repay to those bold men who, during the latter part of the sixteenth century, disseminated from their pulpits and assemblies sentiments which the people cherished in their hearts, and which at a fitting moment they reproduced, to the dismay, eventually to the destruction of those who threatened their liberties." Such were the ancestors of the men who, one hundred years later,

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poured into the beautiful plains and smiling valleys of Central and Western Carolina. Filled with the traditions of their fierce-handed sires, and deeply grounded in those grand principles of human freedom which had shorn the British crown of its dangerous prerogatives, and firmly established the supremacy of the people's representatives, the Commons, they sowed them broadcast in the virgin soil of their new country. They took root and grew apace. The germ of self-government, it is true, was here before they came; the colonists had at so early a day as 1666 established their home legislature, and begun to taste the sweets of having laws-made by those who were to live under them. But none understood these principles better, if so well, as the Scotch-Irish; and none were so early, unanimous, and persistent in their maintenance. Resistance to tyranny in all its forms seemed to be their normal condition. It was a part of their religion. Their pulpits in all the land thundered with the messages of the Gospel and defiance of oppressors; with warnings against the wrath to come, and that which now is, upon earth; and piety was profusely mixed with politics and patriotism, as it ever will be when the Church as well as the Government fights for existence. Their longcontinued persecutions and conflicts in the old country made them astute in all the ways of thwarting tyranny. With every sense sharpened, they stood like greyhounds straining. in the leash when the final troubles with the mother country came, and the world knows how they went into that contest, and how they bore themselves through it. The Mecklenburg Declaration of the 20th May, 1775, and the Resolves of the 31st of May following, which were almost exclusively their work, show the stuff of which they were made. No word here is intended to detract from the patriotism of any other class of our settler-ancestors. All did nobly, but these ScotchIrish undoubtedly led in the struggle for American, as their fathers had done for British liberty.

Viewed entirely in a secular aspect, there would seem to be something in the religious creed of these people which imparted to the masses a superiority over the same class of their cotemporary religionists. At more than one period, history tells us that the freedom and Protestantism of the world hung upon the broad shoulders of those who professed the severe and gloomy creed of Calvin. Highly metaphysical, and, to the common mind, apparently incomprehensible, it more than all others, in my opinion, learns a people to think. No ignorant, unreflecting, unreasoning man, can be a Calvinist except in name. Hugh Miller, that great self-taught Scotchman, says that it has done more for his country than all the penny magazines and societies for the diffusion of useful knowledge have done, or can do for England, and, in substance, that it has furnished Scotland both brains and patriotism. The important part it has ever performed in western civilization. would seem to justify this high opinion of its educating properties. Mr. Buckle says the tyranny of its clergy was quite equal, if less bloody, to that of the Spanish Inquisition, but that whereas the spirit of the latter was servile, and sunk the Spanish mind into ruinous slavery and decline, that of the former was in the highest degree bold and rebellious, and raised the whole Scotch intellect into freedom and progress. Indeed, so powerful its influence seems to have been in imparting strength and vigor to national character, that during the period so eloquently and graphically pictured by Mr. Motley in his life of John of Barneveld, in the contemptible reign of James I., which virtually put England on the other side, the whole fabric of civil and religious liberty depended on the little Calvanistic communities of the Dutch Republic, and but for them Luther would have lived in vain.

Doubtless, too, the form of government in those communions had much to do with the political results, as well as their doctrines. This was essentially democratic, and presented in

its workings an excellent representation of a republic based upon popular suffrage. As their oppressions mostly came from prelacy, monarchy and aristocracy, quite naturally their teachings ran in the opposite direction. In this way the great masses were taught to think, not only of their metaphysical creed, but in regard to the forms of government also, and they soon came to regard those political systems which nearest resembled those of the Church as the best.

Whilst the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who settled in Virginia and the Carolinas thus brought with them the noblest lessons of their Church, religious and political, it is a subject worthy of especial remark and congratulation that they left its bigotry, intolerance, and meanness behind, or else landed it in other ports than ours. Puritanism has been described as Presbyterianism gone to seed, but no such seed was ever gathered on the soil of North Carolina. Though themselves, for the most part, exiles for conscience sake, they did not, so soon as they had found a refuge in the goodly land and had waxed strong under the protecting wing of religious equality, erect a trans-atlantic inquisition and re-enact the sins of their old-world tyrants. No shadow of religious intolerance dims the brightness of our escutcheon; no blue laws disgrace the statute-books of North Carolina, or mar the fair pages of two hundred years of legislation devoted to the peace and happiness of all who were subject to its provisions. Nor in all this time do our private annals speak of an unchristian lording of one religious body over another. They all remembered that they themselves had been strangers in Egypt, and had been brought up out of the house of bondage, and they oppressed not the stranger. This difference has ever been maintained, and constitutes a most peculiar separating line between the northern and southern professors of the same faith, though the persecuting features of the former section have long since dist appeared, and its asceticism has been greatly modified.