ation. Wars and despotisms in
other parts of Europe sent thousands of intelligent exiles thither, and
those free provinces were crowded with ingenious mechanics, and artists,
and learned men, because conscience was there undisturbed, and the hand
and brain were free to win and use the rewards of their industry and
skill. Beautiful cities, towns, and villages were strewn over the whole
country, and nowhere in Europe did society present an aspect half as
pleasing as that of Holland. Every religious sect there found an asylum
from persecution and encouragement to manly effort, by the kind respect
of all. And at the very time when the charter of the West India Company
was under consideration, that band of English Puritans who afterward set
up the ensign of free institutions on the shores of Massachusetts Bay,
were being nurtured in the bosom of that republic, and instructed in
those principles of civil liberty that became a salutary leaven in the
bigotry which they brought with them.

[Picture: First settlement of New York]

"Such were the people who laid the foundations of the Commonwealth of New
York. They were men of expanded views, liberal feelings, and never
dreamed of questioning any man's inalienable right to 'life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness' among them, whether he first inspired the
common air in Holland, England, Abyssinia, or Kamtschatka. And as the
population increased and became heterogeneous, that very toleration
became a reproach; and their Puritan neighbors on the east, and Churchmen
and Romanists on the south, called New Amsterdam 'a cage of unclean
birds.'"

The English, now awake to the importance of Hudson's discoveries, warned
the Dutch Government to refrain from making further settlements on
"Hudson's River," as they called the Mauritius; but the latter, relying
upon the justice of their claim, which was based upon Hudson's discovery,
paid no attention to these warnings, and in the spring of 1623 the Dutch
West India Company sent over thirty families of Walloons, or 110 persons
in all, to found a permanent colony at New Amsterdam, which, until now,
had been inhabited only by fur traders. These Walloons were Protestants,
from the frontier between France and Flanders, and had fled to Amsterdam
to escape religious persecution in France. They were sound, healthy,
vigorous, and pious people, and could be relied upon to make homes in the
New World. The majority of them