Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
I was daily conversant, and pursued, fearlessly, every speculation on religion and
government that occurred. This spirit was encouraged by Ludloe, who failed not to
comment on my narrative, and multiply deductions from my principles.
He taught me to ascribe the evils that infest society to the errors of opinion.
The absurd and unequal distribution of power and property gave birth to poverty
and riches, and these were the sources of luxury and crimes. These positions were
readily admitted; but the remedy for these ills, the means of rectifying these errors
were not easily discovered. We have been inclined to impute them to inherent
defects in the moral constitution of men: that oppression and tyranny grow up by a
sort of natural necessity, and that they will perish only when the human species is
extinct. Ludloe laboured to prove that this was, by no means, the case: that man is
the creature of circumstances: that he is capable of endless improvement: that his
progress has been stopped by the articial impediment of government: that by the
removal of this, the fondest dreams of imagination will be realized.
From detailing and accounting for the evils which exist under our present
institutions, he usually proceeded to delineate some scheme of Utopian felicity,
where the empire of reason should supplant that of force: where justice should be
universally understood and practised; where the interest of the whole and of the
individual should be seen by all to be the same; where the public good should be
the scope of all activity; where the tasks of all should be the same, and the means
of subsistence equally distributed.
No one could contemplate his pictures without rapture. By their
comprehensiveness and amplitude they lled the imagination. I was unwilling
to believe that in no region of the world, or at no period could these ideas be
realized. It was plain that the nations of Europe were tending to greater depravity,
and would be the prey of perpetual vicissitude. All individual attempts at their
reformation would be fruitless. He therefore who desired the diusion of right
principles, to make a just system be adopted by a whole community, must pursue
some extraordinary method.
In this state of mind I recollected my native country, where a few colonists from
Britain had sown the germe of populous and mighty empires. Attended, as they
were, into their new abode, by all their prejudices, yet such had been the inuence
of new circumstances, of consulting for their own happiness, of adopting simple
forms of government, and excluding nobles and kings from their system, that they
enjoyed a degree of happiness far superior to their parent state.
To conquer the prejudices and change the habits of millions, are impossible. The
human mind, exposed to social inuences, inexibly adheres to the direction that
is given to it; but for the same reason why men, who begin in error will continue,
those who commence in truth, may be expected to persist. Habit and example will
operate with equal force in both instances.
Let a few, suciently enlightened and disinterested, take up their abode in
some unvisited region. Let their social scheme be founded in equity, and how
small soever their original number may be, their growth into a nation is inevitable.
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