The mass of the early colonists having been sufferers at home, as well from social and political inequalities as from the heavy hand of power applied to themselves, having left behind them much that they dreaded and nothing that they approved in the management of public affairs, were exposed to no influences that could disincline them to the establishment of just and equal governments in the land of their adoption. Nothing could therefore be more natural than that they and their immediate descendants, made familiar with the wrongs and outrages practiced on their fathers by absolute tyrants, should have been jealous of their liberties, and disposed to be rigid in their restrictions upon the grant and exercise of delegated authority. From this disposition sprang the principles to which they always adhered in the administration of public affairs, and in the defense of which they appear to have been always ready to make any necessary sacrifice. These, on the part of by far the largest portions of the original colonists and their descendants, were an insurmountable opposition to hereditary political power in any shape and under any circumstances; a suspicious watchfulness of all official authority, proportioned to their knowledge of its liability to be abused; a consequent indisposition to concede more than was indispensable to good government; the establishment of a certain, and, as they called it, a swift responsibility for the exercise of that which was granted; an habitual distrust, exhibited on various occasions in their history, of every offer of special privileges by government, and an unwillingness to confer the power to grant them,--the former springing from suspicion that they were designed to impair their independence, and the latter from conviction, fully justified by experience, that such a power will always end in favoritism; and an early and strong appreciation of the value of union among themselves and between the colonies, originating in the necessity for their protection against the savages, and kept alive by perpetual machinations from the mother country to weaken and restrict their freedom.