To fully understand the opposition of thought wherein our “irrepressible conflict” had its inception and lay so long in embryo, to burst forth at last in the awful and bloody travail of a nation divided and at arms, some knowledge of the history and psychology of the peoples who settled the American colonies is necessary; for a nation’s cataclysms are not spontaneously generated, but are the result of forces which though for generations are silent and hidden are gathering strength under the evils of superstition, oppression, or fanaticism, and only need such an explosive as the tongue of a Danton, Robespierre, Garrison, Beecher, or Stowe to hurl the people into death and desolation. The early settlers who have left their impress on American life and character were of the same country and traditions, but their manners and ideals had been developed by the opposing forces which began to stir England during the Renaissance--a hundred and fifty years before the Reformation--forces of which our own Civil War seems as direct a sequence as were the religio-political feuds of the 16th and 17th century England. In the New World the exponents of these contrasting forces were divided for the first century and a half by what afterwards became known as Mason’s and Dixon’s Line and by vast areas of uninhabited wilderness. Virginia was no Mecca for the religiously or politically oppressed, but drew to her soldiers of fortune--men impelled by a spirit of adventure, or those who for some delinquency wished to lose their identity in the vast, unknown New World; among them were many gentlemen who more often than not possessed the vices and follies of a corrupt age. The first who became permanent settlers were divided on the outward voyages by jealousies and dissensions. These differences were carried into the colony; aggravated by the greed and selfishness of those placed in authority, they became greater hardships than the illness, starvation, and Indian treacheries which hampered early progress. There were “poor gentlemen, Tradesmen, Servingmen, libertines, and such like, ten times more fit to spoyle a Commonwealth, than either begin one, or but helpe to maintain one. For when neither the feare of God, nor the law, nor shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here, there is small hope ever to bring one in twenty of them ever to be good there. Notwithstanding, I confesse divers amongst them, had better mindes and grew much more industrious than was expected.”[2] Amid treacheries and deceits, John Smith stands forth a hero. Through his thought and action the colony not only survived the vicissitudes of fire, starvation, and massacre, but was saved from itself, for the evils of its own lawless, disturbing elements were greater dangers than those which came from without. The hope of gold was ostensibly the colony’s _raison d’être_: “The worst of all was our gilded refiners with their golden promises