Aristopia/Chapter 21
At the close of the war, England began an increased taxation of the colonies, to defray its expenses. Intense dissatisfaction was produced as one tax after another was levied. The Americans now saw that it was no longer the King and Parliament, but the electors of Parliament, who were bent on oppressing them. Every village shopkeeper and country squire in England began to talk of the taxes which ought to be imposed on "our subjects in America." Seeing this, the Americans began to think of separation, and talk of armed resistance. Aristopia did her best to encourage the other colonies to resistance, for she determined that the time for independence had almost arrived. She began to drill great numbers of militia, establish foundries for cannon, and factories for muskets and powder.
In some great caverns in Kentucky saltpeter in immense quantities had been discovered; Aristopia could manufacture powder, importing only the sulphur.
The population of the commonwealth in 1774 had become fully four millions. The immigration, by the immense expenditures of Ralph Morton, had been such as the world had never seen elsewhere. The circumstances of life were so favorable that the natural increase of the colony, by the excess of births over deaths, was sufficient to double the population every thirty years or less, exclusive of immigration. The suppression of the smallpox by vaccination was sufficient of itself to give the commonwealth an immense advantage over other countries.
The population of other English colonies, exclusive of Canada, was a little less than two and a half millions. Aristopia had doubtless drawn off some people who, but for her, would have gone to the Atlantic colonies; but most of her immigrants were those who would never have reached America without her aid: the Irish; the poor peasants of England, Scotland, and the western shores of the continent; the people of the far inland regions, eastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Savoy, Lombardy, and Venice, who would not have come to America but for the far-reaching and effective Morton agencies.
Aristopia, for convenience of administration of public affairs, had been divided into six states: Alleghany, extending from the crest of the Alleghany Mountains on the east to the Alleghany, Ohio, and Big Sandy rivers on the west; Ohio, bounded on the east and south by the Alleghany River and Ohio River, and on west by the eighty-fourth meridian; Columbia, extending from the eighty-fourth meridian to the Wabash River; Elenwah, lying between the Wabash and the Mississippi; Mizouri, extending from the Mississippi indefinitely westward; and Kentucky including all of Aristopia lying south of the Ohio and west of the Big Sandy River. The nominal boundaries of Aristopia were the thirty-eighth parallel on the south and the forty-first parallel on the north; but there were many settlements of Aristopia beyond those lines, especially in Kentucky. The population of Alleghany was more than a million, and that of Ohio nearly a million.
Each of these states had a governor and a legislature with limited legislative powers for local government. The chief executive of the commonwealth was now called the Governor-general.
In popular education, the condition of agriculture and the mechanical arts, Aristopia was far in advance of the Atlantic colonies and in some respects of England. Virginia, although the most populous of the Atlantic colonies, except only Massachusetts, was the most backward in civilization. No improvement could be expected from her frontiersmen, living in semi-barbarism, and little from her aristocratic and indolent planters, and, of course, none at all from the abject white servants and still more abject black slaves of the planters. The colony had a college or two for the sons of rich planters, but few public schools for the common people, and only two or three printing-presses. All the other Atlantic colonies south of Pennsylvania were like Virginia, although in a less degree.
In Massachusetts, improvement was checked by another cause—religious bigotry and superstition. Although there were printing-presses and public schools in the colony, the teaching, beyond the merest rudiments of English, was only Latin and theology. One of their own writers on the agriculture of New England before the Revolution says: "The man who ventured to try experiments was looked on with displeasure. If one did not plant just as many acres of corn as his father did, and that, too, in the old of the moon; if he did not sow just as much rye to the acre and use the same number of oxen to the plow; if he did not hoe as many times as his father and grandfather did; if, in short, he did not adopt the same views and prejudices his father had done, he was shunned in the company of old and young, and looked on as a visionary."
They had near them a fair example of progress in the Dutch settlers of the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, whose industry was so well seconded by ingenuity and improvement as to lead to great comfort and prosperity; but the Puritans carefully avoided profiting by the example. When shown any ingenious device for agricultural, mechanical, or household use, the New Englander was accustomed to say: "It beats the Dutch!" While he said aloud: "It beats the Dutch," he thought to himself: "It beats the Devil!" for to his mind Satan was the father of innovations. It was not until near the Revolution that the crust of bigotry was broken and the New England mind began to expand, and "Yankee ingenuity" began to "beat the Dutch!" The strong reaction which followed the witchcraft delusion was the dawning of the day after the night of bigotry and superstition in New England.
The one thing in which the Puritans appear to have made an innovation was in sawing lumber. Somewhere about 1640, saw-mills, then unknown in England, were introduced into Massachusetts. Some of the Puritans had seen saw-mills driven by water-power during their exile in Germany, and, strange to say, did not consider them a device of Satan to enslave men's souls.
In Aristopia every public school had a large library of books of useful knowledge, and every child attended school for twelve or fifteen years, studying not Latin and theology, but mathematics, geography, astronomy, and what was then known of chemical science. Improvement was a matter of course, and innovation which promised improvement was welcomed.