: The Mentor: Holland v. 2 Num. 6 Serial No. 58 May 1 1914 by Elmendorf Dwight L Dwight Lathrop - Netherlands The Mentor

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NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 72 FIFTH AVENUE.

SINGLE NUMBER, 50 CENTS. YEARLY SUBSCRIPTION, .00.

Entered at the Post Office at New York, and admitted for transmission through the mails at second-class rates.

APPLETONS' POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

JANUARY, 1899.

THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.

BY JAMES COLLIER.

The bond servants, who were common in New England and at first more numerous than slaves in the Southern States, repeated the status of the English serfs. Their origin was various. Crime, debt, sale by parents, voluntary surrender, and kidnapping all contributed their quota. The period of indentured service was at first from seven to ten years, and was ultimately reduced to a fixed term of four years. They were exchanged and sold like any other commodity. Their treatment seems to have been often harsh. Like the Australian convicts, many of them prospered. Leading families in the United States trace their origin to bondmen. Not a few of the Southern overseers, free laborers, and small farmers are believed to be descended from them. The vagabond element in all the States, the "white trash" of the South, and the criminal and pauper inhabitants of certain regions in the North are also affiliated on the more degraded sections of the class.

Colonies sometimes anticipate the development of the mother country. The communistic dreams of the forties in France and England were for a brief while realized in old Virginia, as they are at this hour being realized in the village settlements of South Australia; and the state socialism rendered popular by the German victories of 1870 was perhaps more thoroughly embodied in convict New South Wales than anywhere else outside of Peru under the Incas, as it is now sweeping all of the Australasian colonies onward to an unknown goal.

FOOTNOTES:

See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social Conditions in the Colonies. Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850.

THE MIND'S EYE.

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