At Jamestown, seven miles distant from Williamsburg, was established the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent. There at Jamestown English settlers planted English institutions, had the first jury trial, and summoned the first assembly of the people. There, too, was the first enunciation on this continent of the memorable principle that taxes must not be imposed except with consent of the people in their representative assembly. All subsequent English colonization in America had its chief inspiration in the successful upbuilding of the settlement at Jamestown. The Peninsula is in truth “the cradle of the Union.” [Illustration: “OLD POWDER-HORN.”] But the Peninsula has also its Yorktown, thirteen miles distant from Williamsburg. This place, which once had a very great trade with Glasgow and London, but which was never more than a village of a few hundred inhabitants, may, nevertheless, claim to be the beginning and ending of Colonial resistance. Towering on the river bank is the beautiful monument, erected in 1881, which tells that there Lord Cornwallis surrendered in 1781 the British power in America to George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the American armies. But another monument might stand in close proximity, with this inscription, that there the first meeting of the people of Virginia was held in 1635 under the leadership of Nicholas Martian, an ancestor of Washington, to protest against the tyranny of the Governor, Sir John Harvey, who was shortly after deposed and sent a prisoner to England in the custody of two members of the Assembly. Nor, in referring to this neighborhood, must I omit mention of Hampton at the extreme end of the Peninsula, which is the oldest town in English America, which boasts the oldest free school, and which, twice a victim to the flames of war, gave its name to the great landlocked haven where the _Merrimac_ revolutionized naval warfare by its victory over the Federal wooden battle-ships in 1862. Finally, six miles from Hampton is Newport News, where the first cotton was planted in America, and where there has suddenly sprung up a rushing, driving city, tremulous with the hopes of the future, and already realizing the dream of its first settlers, who relied on the magnificent opportunities which its situation at the conjunction of the James River with Hampton Roads afforded. The Peninsula has been traversed by British, French, and American armies, and in our own times is memorable as the scene of the tremendous struggle between the opposing armies of the Northern and Southern States, under the lead of McClellan and Johnston--a struggle sustained on both sides with conspicuous bravery and endurance, and culminating in the battles about Richmond in 1862.