n and direct
inducement to these undertakings, and there could hardly exist more than
the hope of a successful imitation of institutions with which they were
already acquainted, and of holding an equality with their neighbors in
the course of improvement. The laws and customs, both political and
municipal, as well as the religious worship of the parent city, were
transferred to the colony; and the parent city herself, with all such of
her colonies as were not too far remote for frequent intercourse and
common sentiments, would appear like a family of cities, more or less
dependent, and more or less connected. We know how imperfect this system
was, as a system of general politics, and what scope it gave to those
mutual dissensions and conflicts which proved so fatal to Greece.

But it is more pertinent to our present purpose to observe, that nothing
existed in the character of Grecian emigrations, or in the spirit and
intelligence of the emigrants, likely to give a new and important
direction to human affairs, or a new impulse to the human mind. Their
motives were not high enough, their views were not sufficiently large
and prospective. They went not forth, like our ancestors, to erect
systems of more perfect civil liberty, or to enjoy a higher degree of
religious freedom. Above all, there was nothing in the religion and
learning of the age, that could either inspire high purposes, or give
the ability to execute them. Whatever restraints on civil liberty, or
whatever abuses in religious worship, existed at the time of our
fathers' emigration, yet even then all was light in the moral and mental
world, in comparison with its condition in most periods of the ancient
states. The settlement of a new continent, in an age of progressive
knowledge and improvement, could not but do more than merely enlarge the
natural boundaries of the habitable world. It could not but do much more
even than extend commerce and increase wealth among the human race. We
see how this event has acted, how it must have acted, and wonder only
why it did not act sooner, in the production of moral effects, on the
state of human knowledge, the general tone of human sentiments, and the
prospects of human happiness. It gave to civilized man not only a new
continent to be inhabited and cultivated, and new seas to be explored;
but it gave him also a new range for his thoughts, new objects for
curiosity, and new excitements to knowledge and improvement.

Roma