AN ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THIS NATION, WRITTEN BOSTON AND NEW YORK MDCCC XCVIII PREFACE THE scene of the happy republic which Sir Thomas More describes in his "Utopia" is laid in an island said to have been recently discovered in America. The learned Budæus and others accepted More's description as a genuine history, but it was only a dream. The Utopia which Sir Edwin Sandys and other advanced statesmen designed was a reality, but it has had no genuine history. It has been said that "the history of every nation begins with myth. . When the age of reflection arrives and the nation begins to speculate on its origin, it has no more recollection of what happened in its infancy than a man has of what happened to him in his cradle, and in the absence of records has been disposed to accept for itself a mythical foundation and founder." When our age of reflection arrived "Smith's history was almost the only source from which we derived any knowledge of the infancy of our State;" and it came to be regarded as the standard authority on our foundation and its author as our founder. It was my original intention to consider fully in the text of this work each one of the numerous questions involved in "the John Smith controversy," but so much depends upon the point from which we look that I became convinced that so long as any one looked from the John Smith standpoint he would retain the John Smith views regardless of other evidences, and that if he should conclude to take the right view he would then see correctly without any aid from others. Therefore I decided to avoid the needless controversies in the text and to devote it especially to an account of the origin of this nation from the point of |