…the most striking thing about the settlers of Jamestown was their startling similarity to the ancient pioneers who built settlements in other parts of the world 5,000 years earlier. The whole panorama of Jamestown demonstreated how shockingly little progress had been made by man during the past 5,000 years.
The settlers of Jamestown had come in a boat no larger and no more commodious than those of the ancient sea kings. Their tools still consisted of shovel, axe, hoe, and a stick plow which were only slightly improved over those of China, Egypt, Persia, and Greece. They harvested their grain and hay-grass with the same primitive scythes. They wore cloths made of thread spun on a wheel and woven by hand. Their medicines were noxious concoctions based on superstition rather than science. Their transportation was by cart and oxen.
Most of them died young.l Out of approximately 9,000 settlers who found their way to old Jamestown, only about 1,000 survived.
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Soon, two whole centuries had passed into history. By 1976 the “noble experiment” of American independence and free-enterprise economics had produced some phenomenal results.
One need not be an American citizen to feel a sense of genuine rice in the fantastic list of achievements which bubbled up from the massive melting pot of humanity that swarmed to the shores of this new land and contributed to its mighty leap in technical, political, and economic achievement.
The climate of free-market economics allowed science to thrive in an explosion of discoveries which, in merely 200 years, gave the world the gigantic new power resources of harnessed electricity, the internal combustion engine, jet propulsion, exotic space vehicles, and all the wonders of nuclear energy.
Communications were revolutionized, first by the telegraph, then the telephone, followed by radio and television. The whole earth was explored from pole to pole, even the depths of the sea. The men left the earth in rocket ships and actually walked on the moon. They sent up a space plane that could be maneuvered and landed back on earth.
The average length of life was doubled; the quality of life was tremendously enhanced. Homes, food, textiles, communications, transportation, central heating, central cooling, world travel, millions of books, a high literacy rate, schools for everybody, surgical miracles, medical cures for age-old diseases, entertainment at the touch of a switch, and instant news, twenty four hours a day.
Of course all of this did not happen just in American, but it did flow out primarily from the swift current of freedom and prosperity which the American founders turned loose into the spillways of human progress all over the world.
In 200 years, the human race had made a 5,000 year leap.
