HISTORY OF BROOKLYN. 241

the constitution of 1848, one of the consequences of the French revolution in that year, abolished the political importance of the nobility, inaugurated by the now system. It would be absurd to connect these late creations with their relatives, if there be any such, in America. I might give the escutcheons of the few of the old noblesse whose names exist in our country; but it would be of no account—two or three at the outside, and these of dubious relationship—and certainly with no satisfactory result. In fact, in whatever light you regard the subject, the grand truth, to which I have already referred, stands boldly prominent, that our settlers belonged to no privileged class. They came from the towns, where an uncommon commercial activity had arisen, consequent upon the independence of the country. They came from the fields, where the lands were held by the proprietors in a kind of feudal tenure which exists even to this day in a large portion of the country. They went to America to make their fortunes in trade, or to secure a landed estate which would belong to them and their children. They went there carrying with them free and tolerant principles. In conversing on the subject of their emigration, not long since, with a distinguished scholar of this city (the Hague), he asked me if the descendants of the Dutch in America were not very conservative in their feelings. He judged from the national character. I answered that they were eminently so, but that they were republicans. He smiled, and asked me further if they were not Calvinists. I told him I believed that they adhered, more closely than the Church here, to the faith and practice of their fathers. And so it is, I believe, in political and religious matters: the Dutch of America retain the ancient principles of the Fatherland more strongly than the Dutch of Holland; and in this they show that they have sprang, not from privileged, but from republican loins.”