56 Swartbmore Xecture.

Baptists had been persecuted through all Europe like wild beasts, and the first generation ofQuakers was only too familiar with the terribleprisons of that day. And in the eighteenthcentury England had driven the colonists to revoltby her harsh application of the Navigation Acts,by taxation of the Colonies without their consent,and by industrial prohibitions in a mercantilistsense, such as forbade the New England colonistseven to make nails for their own use ! Freedomcame to mean, therefore, next to freedom ofreligious life, freedom of economic life. Cromwellhad already opened the gate to this, and the move-ment grew in England and America during theeighteenth century into the system of free com-petition, built on freedom of property and freedomof contract, an economic system never tried beforeand in fact an unheard of innovation. It meantthe abdication of the State in the field of economics.For the first time in history the economic fabricwas built upon the personal responsibility of eachindividual. From this root sprang the modernphenomenon of the " self-made man" who camegradually into prominence to burst the confinesof tradition in the eighteenth century England, and to create the " American miracle " of thetwentieth century.

America was from the first set on privateinitiative, the effective realisation of personality,the spirit of the frontiersman felling primevalforests and breaking up the virgin prairie with hisplough. To such a man the government was inno sense a providence. All he expected of it was