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colonies, but if we remember that African theologians Cyprian and Tertullian, Augustine and, it seems, the author or authors of the Athanasian Creed shaped the religion that was to mold barbarous Europe, we may consider that no colonies, ancient or modern, ever lived for more idealist ends, or produced a set of more important variations, than the Roman colony of Africa.
Not only greed of gold, but a passion for adventure, lay at the beginnings of most of the colonies in South America. The dream of a golden age and a fountain of youth gilded, and some- times tarnished, the romance of Spanish colonization. A new type of individual, if hardly a new social type, was for a time generated among the conquistador es. Blended patriotism and religious enthusiasm inspired the short-lived Calvinist colony in Brazil and the assassinated Huguenot colony in Florida. A new social form was the object of their founders. Religious zeal like- wise gave rise to the first Spanish settlement in the same country, and it almost founded, as it almost discovered, French North America.
A sober idealism gave birth, a century later, to the largest and most durable political variations that any modern colony has pre- sented. The social structure of Virginia was, of all the North American colonies, the most continuous with England; yet it was the first state in the world where manhood suffrage was conceded. The representative assembly thus elected was supreme and posesssed all the rights of an independent state : it levied war and concluded peace, acquired territory, and framed treaties. It elected its governor and deposed him. The sovereignty of the people was declared. The governor acknowledged himself the " servant of the assembly," and could not dissolve it. It asserted unlimited liberty of conscience and opposed arbitrary taxation. A love of liberty was a passion. With a single exception, reli- gious tolerance was complete; and the colony was almost an independent commonwealth. All unconsciously, Bancroft be- lieves, the Virginians obeyed the impulses that were controlling the advancement of humanity, but the movement was in part conscious as well. In 1659 the Virginian Assembly claimed the
