Governor Morton was especially desirous of procuring immigrants from Switzerland—a hardy, industrious, intelligent, and moral race. As the poor resources of the country could not support her increasing swarms, many of the people were desirous of emigrating. Many of her young men were sent as mercenaries in foreign wars, and, as a consequence, there was a superabundance of women in Switzerland, while in Aristopia there was a deficiency; so particular effort was made to induce unmarried Swiss women to come to Aristopia. The fare of all these emigrants was paid down the Rhine to points accessible to Governor Morton's vessels, in which they were given free transportation to America, as, indeed, were all other emigrants to Aristopia.
In some of the cities of northern Italy, as Genoa, Milan, and Venice, were some of the most skilful workmen in the world, and many of the people of that region, particularly of Savoy, were Protestants, severely oppressed by their rulers and desirous of emigrating. Governor Morton had two of his ships ply regularly between Genoa and Mortonia, bringing emigrants from Genoa.
In 1618, the Thirty Years' Warm Germany broke out. It was the custom of that age to hold prisoners of war for ransom, in default of which they were sold into servitude differing from slavery principally in being for a term instead of for life. Governor Morton's agents purchased thousands of these prisoners, who, on taking the oath of allegiance to the government of Aristopia, were shipped thither to become citizens in due time. The families of such of them as had families whose whereabouts could be discovered were brought over to America. During this war the theater of military operations was horribly devastated, the war being one of peculiar bitterness. Myriads of women and children, their houses burned, their property destroyed or carried off, and their male relatives killed, were driven into the fields and woods to perish with hunger and exposure or subsist miserably on roots and herbs. Thousands of these unfortunates were picked up by Governor Morton's agents and shipped to Aristopia, where they found comfortable homes, and the women were soon married.
Governor Morton also, at his own expense, founded and sustained orphan asylums at Mortonia and Morgania, in which thousands of orphans brought from European cities were reared and educated, both intellectually and industrially, into good, capable, and industrious citizens of Aristopia. They acquired the Aristopian spirit more readily than the adult immigrants, as they had not so many European prejudices to overcome.
That the heterogeneous materials, gathered in so many countries, of different sects, nationalities, and languages, did not assimilate without some effervescence may easily be imagined. There were many broils, especially on religious matters, which gave Governor Morton much uneasiness; but they passed over without serious consequences. Religious bigotry in Aristopia was to that in Europe as vaccinosis is to small-pox. In Aristopia was seen what Campbell sings of Wyoming:
And spoke in friendship every distant tongue;
Men from the blood of warring Europe sprung,
Were but divided by the running brook."
That the ideas of the age demanded something in the nature of religion in schools Governor Morton could not deny; but he persuaded the people to be contented with the reading in the schools of a volume composed of the four gospels with simple historical comments, to enable the children to understand the literal meaning of the words; but all attempts at doctrinal comment or explanation were excluded. The version used was the King James', but in the reformed spelling, as were all the school-books of Aristopia.
Governor Morton had established a large printing-office, which every year turned out many thousand volumes of works of useful knowledge. He employed persons in England not only to make translations of works in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, but to rewrite, in a concise and popular style, works written in a prolix and antiquated style of English. These works were published in Aristopia, of course in the reformed spelling and grammar, and a copy of each was given to every school library. Learning this language in their school-books, the children adopted it as their own, and there gradually grew up an Aristopian language which may he described as a perfected English.
While the colony of Aristopia was thus advancing with giant strides (but so quietly as to attract little public attention in England), the colony of Virginia still crawled feebly along with its "strange miracles of misery." There was not a single village or hamlet in the colony except Jamestown, and that was smaller after twenty years than it was two years after it was founded. Each family lived isolated, every planter a petty lordling with his black slaves (for negro slavery had been introduced) and white indentured servants, the latter hardly less slaves than the former. Indeed, the laws of both Virginia and Maryland made it punishable with death for one of these white servants to run away, a crime described with grim quaintness as a "theft of himself." Many friendless persons, especially orphan boys old enough to do considerable work, were kidnapped in England and Scotland, and sold into servitude in Virginia. Many of these indentured servants escaped into Aristopia. The government would not shelter these persons officially nor prevent their masters from retaking them, not wishing to embroil itself with the neighboring colonies; but there were not lacking persons in Aristopia to assist the fugitives to pass swiftly and secretly over the mountains to the remote western settlements, so that one could hardly ever be retaken by his master.
As to negro slavery, as soon as Governor Morton's attention was called to it he foresaw the evils it would bring, as well as its inherent wrong, and he hastened to urge and soon procured a constitutional amendment declaring that slavery or involuntary servitude, except for crime, should never exist in Aristopia. Considering the depraved public sentiment respecting slavery then existing in England, and still more in other parts of Europe, this provision was a very advanced one.
In its relations with England, no other law of Aristopia was so hard to be enforced against the will of the mother country as this law against slavery; for, after the abdication of James II., when Parliament had set up Dutch William as the King of England, the kingdom was ruled by Parliament, which was itself ruled by the trading and manufacturing classes. These classes did their utmost to force negro slavery upon the colonies. Each class had its own reason for this. The manufacturers wanted the colonies to produce only raw materials, which alone could be produced by slave labor. The traders wanted the same thing, as it would increase their trade with the colonies; and they wanted also the profit of the slave trade.
In 1622 the Indians made a wholesale massacre of the scattered colonists of Virginia. The outbreak did not extend to the settlements of Aristopia, but it was a startling warning to them. In 1627 it was estimated that there were less than two thousand white persons living in Virginia, out of the seven thousand sent there and their progeny.
In 1620 a settlement of the Puritans was made in what afterward became the colony of Massachusetts. Arriving in the early part of a terrible winter, nearly destitute on account of the hard terms the Dutch and London merchants made with them in furnishing them passage, there was a great deal of suffering and death, much of it caused by what Captain Smith called "the humorous ignorances of your Brownists." But the Puritans, while professing to esteem worldly things very lightly, were too practical and shrewd long to retain any "humorous ignorances "of their surroundings, and the colony was soon very successful, considering the severity of the climate and the sterility of the soil.
In 1632 Cecil Calvert established a colony whose first settlement was a near neighbor of Mortonia, being near the mouth of the Potomac. Calvert obtained a charter almost exactly like that of Morton. His grant included, roughly speaking, the territory bounded on the east by the Atlantic, on the north by the fortieth parallel, and on the south and east by the Potomac and a line drawn across the eastern peninsula on about the thirty-eighth parallel. His colonists immediately had to fight for their grant with a Virginia adventurer named Clayborne; and many years afterward Calvert's successor was beaten out of a large part of his grant by that shrewd Quaker, William Penn. Calvert was a Catholic, and for a long time the majority of the settlers of his colony, called Maryland, were Catholics. The colony was fairly successful from the start. They found the Indians of the western shore friendly, and never had any trouble with them; but some of the tribes of the eastern shore were vicious and hostile.
Tobacco soon became and remained almost the only product of Virginia and Maryland. It was, in fact, their currency and legal tender. While tobacco was largly cultivated in Aristopia, and could be cultivated better than corn on steep hillsides, it never became the principal product of the colony, although people of Aristopia had a great advantage over those of Virginia in selling their tobacco. Almost every plantation in Virginia fronted on one of the several navigable rivers. Ships from England and Holland anchored in front of the plantation, took on the planter's tobacco, and unloaded the goods in which it was paid for. Each planter acted for himself. He consigned his tobacco to some English or Dutch merchant, who allowed him what he pleased for the tobacco in goods the price of which was fixed by the merchant. The helpless planter was allowed just enough to keep him from utter despair and from refusing to raise and ship any more tobacco. All the tobacco exported from Aristopia was sent by the commonwealth to one of the governor's agents in England, and a fair price insured. A small profit went to the commonwealth, serving, instead of a tax, to pay public expenses.
Governor Morton early saw that the vast new continent presented for subjection to human control a vaster field than could he conquered by unaided human muscle in centuries, whatever myriads of the surplus population of Europe his gold would enable him to ship over. He saw that the wilderness must be conquered by machinery, and that the wants of the people engaged in the conquest must be ministered to by machinery, driven by water-power to do whatever work could be done by stationary machines, and propelled by horse-power where locomotive machines must be employed.
Agricultural implements and the methods of using them were among the first improvements made. Plows were greatly improved, and it was found that Indian corn could, after the land was freed from roots and numerous stumps, be cultivated with small, light plows much more easily than with hoes by hand, as the Indian squaws had done the work. The governor himself, having great inventive faculties, invented the grain cradle to take the place of the ancient sickle, and a brush scythe, with a short, thick blade, heavily braced, for cutting bushes and brambles, in place of the English bill-hook.
Governor Morton saw, too, that his transmontane colony, not able to export much of its crude products to Europe, as the three hundred miles or more of land carriage would be too expensive, must manufacture for itself, especially heavy and bulky articles; and to do this profitably, with so many hands needed so much in subduing savage nature, would require better machinery than the world had yet seen. Many skillful mechanics, from Holland, Flanders, Genoa, Venice, and the Free Cities of Germany, had come to Aristopia. These were stimulated by hope of reward, both of money and honor, to invent new machines and improve old ones. Laws were passed either allowing the inventor of a mechanical device the sole right of making and selling it for a term of years, or, if the commonwealth saw fit to manufacture the device, obliging it to pay the inventor a premium (better understood as a "royalty") on each article; but these premiums should not aggregate more than ten thousand dollars, for it was not thought meet that the commonwealth should enrich any of its citizens to such an extent as to enable them, if so disposed (and most rich men are so disposed), to oppress or corrupt their fellow-citizens.
But there was a reward to be coveted by inventors which could hardly become dangerous to the commonwealth—honor. Men in all ages and under all forms of government have coveted titles. Civilized or barbarous, royalist or republican, all are ready to risk life, endure suffering, and even give up wealth for titles, or, in other words, honor. When titles are bestowed on the worthy and do not carry with them undue power or a revenue wrung by privilege and monopoly from the people, and are not hereditary, giving to a person, however unworthy, power and honor merely on account of what his father did or was, they are something not to be rejected and despised by a wise social economy. So it was enacted that the Governor of Aristopia should bestow titles of honor on persons of conspicuous merit or who had rendered signal service to the commonwealth. Prominent among those to be so rewarded were inventors. These titles were not to be hereditary nor carry with them any pecuniary reward or revenue—nothing but a gold medal or badge and a ribbon.
Among the great needs of the commonwealth was a machine for the rapid and cheap manufacture of nails. The great increase in the production of lumber by the invention of saw-mills made it possible to build a board bouse much more quickly than a log one, and when built it was more cleanly and sightly. But the cost of band-made nails, many of which were needed in a frame bouse, was a great drawback. Stimulated by promised rewards, and encouraged by the governor's bearing the expense of their experiments, some mechanics soon produced a practicable nail-machine, which, with a single attendant, could cut from a thin strip of iron as many nails in a day as a hundred men could make by hand in the same time. Building was thus cheapened in Aristopia, and nails were made for export. The machine was kept a secret, although it would hardly have been adopted in Europe if known, such was the prejudice against machinery in the old world. When some progressive person ventured to introduce a new machine in Europe, mobs of workmen destroyed it lest it should displace them, and cut off even the poor wages they received. But in Aristopia the poorest workmen had no fear of machinery. None was so dull as not to see that the vast continent offered work which every available hand, aided by every possible machine, could not do in generations. Governor Morton, foreseeing the danger that individuals, through wealth obtained by whatever means, might own and control machinery to such an extent as to oppress laborers, used every device of statecraft, first, to prevent any dangerous accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals, and next, to accustom the people to the public control of great aggregations of manufacturing machinery.
A thing which Governor Morton very much desired, but which he did not see until he was very old, was machinery for spinning and weaving, driven by water-power, replacing the spinning-wheel and hand-loom by which cloth was then produced, a work which fell with great weight on the patient, drudging housewife.