About a century and a half before, on the banks of the Thames, a similar crowd and like outward signs of feeling had attended Cromwell to Westminster, when he was proclaimed Protector of the Commonwealth of England. "What throngs! what acclamations!" said his flatterers. Cromwell replied, "There would be still more, if they were going to hang me." A singular resemblance, and also a noble difference between the sentiments and the language of a corrupted great man and a virtuous great man. Washington was, with reason, anxious about the task which he undertook. The sagacity of a sage, united to the devotedness of a hero, constitutes the highest glory of humanity. The nation, which he had conducted to independence, and which required a government at his hands, being hardly yet formed, was entering upon one of those social changes which render the future so uncertain, and power so perilous. It is a remark often made, and generally assented to, that in the English colonies, before their separation from the mother country, the state of society and feeling was essentially republican, and that every thing was prepared for this form of government. {95} But a republican form of government can govern, and, in point of fact, has governed societies essentially different; and the same society may undergo great changes without ceasing to be a republic. All the English colonies showed themselves, nearly in the same degree, in favor of the republican constitution. At the North and at the South, in Virginia and the Carolinas, as well as in Connecticut and Massachusetts, the public will was the same, so far as the form of government was concerned. Still, (and the remark has been often made,) considered in their social organization, in the condition and relative position of their inhabitants, these colonies were very different. In the South, especially in Virginia and North Carolina, the soil belonged, in general, to large proprietors, who were surrounded by slaves or by cultivators on a small scale. Entails and the right of primogeniture secured the perpetuity of families. There was an established and endowed church. The civil legislation of England, bearing strongly the impress of its feudal origin, had been maintained almost without exception. The social state was aristocratic. {96} In the North, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, &c., the fugitive Puritans had brought with them, and planted there, strict democracy with religious enthusiasm. Here, there was no slavery; there were no large proprietors in the midst of an inferior population, no entailment of landed property; there was no church, with different degrees of rank, and founded in the name of the State; no social superiority, lawfully established and maintained. Man was here left to his own efforts and to divine favor. The spirit of independence and equality had passed from the church to the state.