It may be fairly claimed that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and a maker of lawgivers, if not of laws. We are deficient principally in patience of detail, and the skill which springs from minute subdivision of labor and from hereditary training. All this will come by-and-by,--all the sooner, if our ports are closed by foreign war. No natural incapacity prevents us from making as good broadcloth, as fine linen, as rich silks, as pure porcelain, as the Old World can send us. If England wishes to hasten our complete industrial independence, she has only to quarrel with us. We should miss many things at first which we owe to her longer training, but they are mostly products of that kind of industry which furnishes whatever the market calls for.
The intellectual development of the Colonists was narrowed and limited by the conditions of their new life. There was no need of legislation to discourage the growth of an American literature. At the period of the Revolution two books had been produced which had a right to live, in virtue of their native force and freshness; hardly more than two; for we need not count in this category the records of events, such as Winthrop's Journal, or Prince's Annals, or even that quaint, garrulous, conceited farrago of pedantry and piety, of fact and gossip, Mather's "Magnalia." The two real American books were a "Treatise on the Will," and "Poor Richard's Almanack." Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were the only considerable names in American literature in all that period which, beginning with Milton and Dryden, and including the whole lives of Newton and Locke, reached the time of Hume and Gibbon, of Burke and Chatham, of Johnson and Goldsmith,--a period embracing five generations, filled with an unbroken succession of statesmen, philosophers, poets, divines, historians, who wrote for mankind and immortality. The Colonies, in the mean time, had been fighting Nature and the wild men of the forest, getting a kind of education as they went along. Out of their religious freedom, such as it was, they were rough-hewing the ground-sills of a free state: for religion and politics always play into each other's hands, and the constitution is the child of the catechism. Harvard College was dedicated to "Christ and the Church," but already, in 1742, the question was discussed at Commencement, "Whether it be lawful to resist the supreme magistrate, if the Commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved,"--Samuel Adams speaking in the affirmative.