Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nies, and landholders besides, held posts and titular distinctions from abroad which our people dutifully recognized. Peers of the realm sojourned in America, now and then, officially or otherwise. Even aside from a peerage, Americans had ranks and social grades of their own, notwithstanding the strong approach to political equality in so many provinces. The Virginia Tuckahoes of the tidewater region used in the winter to flock to Williamsburg? that toy capital, as one has called it?for the choice dissipations of a viceregal court; and between mean whites of the South and plantation owners, the social barrier was very great. In the simplest New England towns, where all congenial inhabitants came much into friendly contact, and joined in congregational worship and public discussions, the type of a republic was much like that of which Milton had approved for the English Commonwealth: .. . Orders and degrees Jar not with liberty but well consist. Massachusetts and Connecticut were great exemplars of ceremonial etiquette, and long continued so, as inherited forms of routine and processional programmes still remind us. Both at Harvard and Yale, college students were long arranged in the class lists according to their family consequence. Even our Revolutionary press indulged the prevalent taste of pompously announcing great public characters; thus, in 1776, arrived in Boston from Philadelphia, that most worthy and patriotic gentleman, the Hon. Samuel Adams, Esq., a member of that august and united body, the right honorable the Continental Congress. 1 Aside, indeed, from the British official set in these ‘N. E. C. colonies, we see much nice discrimination used between Mr.,
Esq.,
Captain, and the like; Honorable being the appropriate prefix, and not superfluo…