Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/474

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

of a pioneer existence, and many a silent heroine, the worthy mate of such a settler, has sunk under its privations. 2. The moral attribute most needed is forcefulness of character. Determination and tenacity, often rising (as lately in Rhodesia) into "splendid self-reliance" and devotedness, are the notes of the successful colonist now as ever. Will and not intellect is his differentia. 3. Yet high intellect always springs up to meet the demand when new molds of social life are to be framed, and disappears or flows into other channels when the necessity for it vanishes. The group of statesmen who drafted the Constitution of the United States, and the politicians who nursed the Australasian colonies through the perils of infancy, have had few equals.

IV. A polyp will reproduce itself, however small the fragment, if it have within it samples of all the different kinds of cells. A nation, in order to be fully reproduced, must likewise send out representatives of all its essential classes. 1. Many princes have migrated to ascend a throne, and two have emigrated—a Braganza to Brazil and a Hapsburg to Mexico. 2. Miltiades colonized Thrace, and one of the Bacchiadæ colonized Ortygia. Counts of the empire settled Davos and other mountain districts in German Switzerland. Hidalgos and other members of the royal household joined the second expedition of Columbus, and many of the members of the third colony sent out in his time belonged to the best families in the kingdom. Rich nobles sold their estates, as their ancestors had done in the time of the Crusades, to follow Cortez to Mexico and Pizarro to Peru. These two waves spent, the inferior nobility alone henceforward emigrated. Representatives of the lesser French nobility, like the Barons Poutrincourt and Castin, with Gascon and Norman cadets, were leading or degenerate colonists in Canada, where also many noble ladies contributed their fortunes or spent their lives in mission work among the Indians. In the seventeenth century a Scottish nobleman (the Earl of Stirling) endeavored to colonize Nova Scotia, and early in the nineteenth another (the Earl of Selkirk) led a colony of fur traders to Red River, having previously made a settlement in Prince Edward Island. Sir T. Temple ruined himself by generous efforts to build up a colony in Nova Scotia, and the story of the gentlemen adventurers in Acadia is long and interesting. Some of them, like La Tour, remained in the colony and left descendants. The so-called "nobility" of Carolina toward the end of the seventeenth century was a mere upper class. Even the Virginians, who have boasted of being descendants of the Cavaliers, are stated by Bancroft to have belonged to the middle class. Yet many of the loyal nobility fled from England after the execution of Charles, and these settled in the Southern States. Penn and Balti-