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law) filling honorable stations and performing important services.
But far more narrow is my plan than his projected
dictionary, because, in a grandson of the first settler, it excludes
every other incident after his birth. Space for another than is
here given, would have demanded six volumes, while ten
volumes would have been needed for a fifth generation; and
since we now count eight, nine, or even ten generations of offspring
from not a few of the earlier planters on our shores, fifty
volumes, each as ponderous as the present, might be filled with
details, whereof one tenth would seem ridiculous, one quarter
worthless, and one half wholly uninteresting.
That New England was first occupied by a civilized people
in so short a period before the great civil war broke out in our
mother country, though half a century and more after its elementary
principles began to ferment, especially in Parliament,
and almost in every parish of the kingdom, was a very fortunate
event, if it may not be thought a providential arrangement for
the happiness of mankind. Even if our views be restricted to
the lineal origin of those people here, when the long protracted
impolicy of Great Britain drove our fathers into open hostility
and forced them to become a nation in 1776, in that century
and a half from its colonization, a purer Anglo Saxon race
would be seen on this side of the ocean than on the other.
Within forty years a vast influx of Irish, with not a few thousand
Scotch and Germans has spread over this new country,
but certainly more than four fifths of our people still count their
progenitors among the ante-revolutionary colonists. From long
and careful research I have judged the proportion of the whole
number living here in 1775, that deduce their origin from the
kingdom of England, i.e. the Southern part of Great Britain,
excluding also the principality of Wales, to exceed ninety-eight
in a hundred. Every county, from Northcumberland to Cornwall,
Kent to Cumberland, sent its contribution of emigrants,
and the sparse population of the narrow shire of Rutland had
more than one offshoot in New England. But, during that
interval, great was the diversity of circumstances between the
old and the new country so far as the increase of their respective
numbers by incoming of strangers was affected. In 1660 the
restoration of Charles II.--in 1685 the expulsion of the two
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