al
independence, and especially for his foresight with regard to our
national future. In both these respects his writings are unique. Other
Englishmen were in favor of our independence, and saw our future also;
but I doubt if any one can be named who was his equal in strenuous
action, or in minuteness of foresight. While the war was still
proceeding, as early as 1780, he openly announced, not only that
independence was inevitable, but that the new nation, "founded in nature
and built up in truth," would continually expand; that its population
would increase and multiply; that a civilizing activity beyond what
Europe could ever know would animate it; and that its commercial and
naval power would be found in every quarter of the globe. All this he
set forth at length with argument and illustration, and he called his
prophetic words "the _stating of the simple fact_, so little understood
in the Old World." Treated at first as "unintelligible speculation" and
as "unfashionable," the truth he announced was neglected where it was
not rejected, but generally rejected as inadmissible, and the author,
according to his own language, "was called by the wise men of the
British Cabinet _a Wild Man_, unfit to be employed." But these writings
are a better title now than any office. In manner they are diffuse and
pedantic; but they hardly deserve the cold judgment of John Adams, who
in his old age said of them, that "a reader who has patience to search
for good sense in an uncouth and disgusting style will find in those
writings proofs of a thinking mind."[40]

He seems to have written a good deal. But the works which will be
remembered the longest are not even mentioned by several of his
biographers. Rose, in his Biographical Dictionary, records works by him,
entitled Antiquities of Ancient Greece; Roman Antiquities dug up at
Bath; Observations on the Currents of the Ocean; Intellectual Physics;
and also contributions to the _Archaeologia_. Gorton in his Biographical
Dictionary adds some other titles to this list. But neither mentions his
works on America. This is another instance where the stone rejected by
the builders becomes the head of the corner.

At an early date Pownall comprehended the position of our country,
geographically. He saw the wonderful means of internal communication
supplied by its inland waters, and also the opportunities of external
commerce supplied by the Atlantic Ocean. On the first he dwells, in a
memorial