The stay-at-home people are not to
be found there, and these are the quiet, easy people. A new
settlement voluntarily formed (for of old times, when people were
expelled by terror, I am not speaking) is sure to have in it much
more than the ordinary proportion of active men, and much less than
the ordinary proportion of inactive; and this accounts for a large
part, though not perhaps all, of the difference between the English
in England, and the English in Australia.
The causes which formed New England in recent times cannot be
conceived as acting much upon mankind in their infancy. Society is
not then formed upon a 'voluntary system' but upon an involuntary. A
man in early ages is born to a certain obedience, and cannot
extricate himself from an inherited government. Society then is made
up, not of individuals, but of families; creeds then descend by
inheritance in those families. Lord Melbourne once incurred the
ridicule of philosophers by saying he should adhere to the English
Church BECAUSE it was the religion of his fathers. The philosophers,
of course, said that a man's fathers' believing anything was no
reason for his believing it unless it was true. But Lord Melbourne
was only uttering out of season, and in a modern time, one of the
most firm and accepted maxims of old times.
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