144 Chapter VII
£70,000. In England in 1801 there were probably 10,000 families with an average
income of £1,500 a year or more, of which the capital value would be about
£30,000. There is ground for believing that in England at this time, as in the
United States in 1929, five per cent of the population received over thirty- five per
cent of the income. The distribution of wealth in colonial America was far more
equal.^5
There were recognized inequalities of social rank. But rank somehow lacked the
magic it enjoyed in Europe. In the migration from England and Europe, the well-
situated and the high- born had been notably absent. There were Americans of
aristocratic pretensions, but the most ambitious genealogy led only to some mid-
dling English gentleman’s manor house; most Americans were conscious of no
lineage at all, American genealogy being largely a nineteenth- century science. No
American could truthfully trace his ancestry to the mists of time or the ages of
chivalry—nor, indeed, could many British peers or French noblemen. It was the
complaint of Lord Stirling, as the New Jersey revolutionary, William Alexander,
was called, that he was not recognized as a lord in England. A Swedish clergyman
arriving in New Jersey in 1770, to take over the old Swedish congregation on the
Delaware, found that well- to- do farmers were like lesser gentry in Sweden, in their
use of fine linen and fondness for good horses. The significant thing for America
was that people of this style of life did not, as in Sweden, consider themselves no-
bles. Everyone worked, and to the Swedish newcomer it seemed that “all people
are generally thought equally good.”^6
Whether religion acted as a force in the conflict of the American Revolution is
disputed. Since the Worship of Reason at Notre- Dame de Paris in November
1793, there have always been those who have stressed the religious principles of
the founders of the United States. It is a way of showing how different they were
from Jacobins or Communists. The truth is that the age was not notably religious,
and that the sentiments that burst out violently in Paris in 1793 were, as senti-
ments, not uncommon. We read, for example, of an Anglican rector in England
who, about 1777, so admired the writings of Catherine Macaulay that “he actually
placed her statue, adorned as the Goddess of Liberty, within the altar railing” of his
parish church.^7 “It will never be pretended,” wrote John Adams in 1786, that the
men who set up the new governments in America “had interviews with the gods,
or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven, more than those at work on
ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be ac-
knowledged that these governments were contrived by reason and the senses, as
Copley painted Chatham... [or] as Paine exposed the mistakes of Raynal... .”^8
John Adams, while differing with him in detail, had not yet broken with Thomas
Paine.
5 These statements about wealth and pauperism are derived from the tables in P. Colquhoun, A
Treatise on Indigence (London, 1806), 22, where the estimates of Gregory King for 1688 are also
reproduced.
6 Quoted by L. Lundin, Cockpit of the Revolution: the War jor Independence in New Jersey (Princeton,
1940), 33.
7 E. Sitwell, Bath (London, 1932), 223.
8 Work s (1851), IV, 292–93.