And the different mental habits of the people of America generally, when contrasted with those of Europe, show sufficiently that all our ideas are accidental, the result of local circumstances, though, of course, all are in subordination to those fixed and fundamental laws of mind that are specific with the race. The presence, therefore, of the negro—of a widely different and subordinate element of the population of Virginia, and other States, when it became stationary and had to be provided for by the local legislatures, its specific wants as well as those of the citizenship looked after, and its social adaptations rendered harmonious with the welfare of the former—naturally developed new ideas of government and new modes of thought in the dominant and governing race. Except, possibly, some of the Spanish colonies south of us, there was no portion of the New World where so many of those who could claim connection with European aristocracy originally settled as in the province of Virginia. In the earlier days of Massachusetts a great number of the most respectable of the middle classes of English society, and some few instances of the old hereditary nobility, found new homes in the colony, but in the latter case they had abandoned the old Norman traditions, and to enjoy their religion and “freedom of conscience,” identified themselves with Puritanism. In the Dutch province of New York, there was, perhaps, a somewhat larger infusion of the aristocratic element, but as Holland itself was essentially republican, and the Dutch really the originators of modern liberty in Europe, and, moreover, had a very limited landed aristocracy compared with England, France, etc., but few persons identified by tradition and association with the hereditary aristocracy of the Old World found their way into the Dutch settlements of the New.