utterly unfit for the frugal simplicity and laborious task of the first
state of cultivation. An hardy race, inured to labour, hunger, and
fatigue, were best adapted for making impressions on the thick forest,
and not such emigrants as left the city, tinctured with its vices and
fond of luxury and ease. Nor could the Puritans, who settled before
them, promise themselves much greater success than their neighbours;
though more rigid and austere in their manners, and more religiously
disposed, their scrupulosity about trifles and ceremonies, and their
violent and litigious dispositions, created trouble to all around them,
and disturbed that general harmony so necessary to the welfare and
prosperity of the young settlement. From the various principles which
actuated the populace of England, and the different sects who composed
the first settlers of Carolina, nothing less could be expected, but that
the seeds of division should be imported into that country with its
earliest inhabitants.

We are apt to attend chiefly to the desolating wars, or the great and
surprising revolutions which happen to kingdoms in their populous and
advanced state, and to pass over the events of their rise and progress as
trifling and inconsiderable; but as the greatest nations upon earth have
gradually sprung from such beginnings, it is no less curious and
instructive to view the smaller transactions of their infant state, than
the grander events of their mature age. Kingdoms in the political world,
like plants in the vegetable, have their stages of rise, progress,
perfection, and decline; and, in the fields of nature, it is equally
pleasant to mark the buds of the spring, as the bloom of summer, or the
decay of autumn.

[Sidenote] America peopled in an improved age.