Politics & Power Quote by Ezra Stiles

A cleric predicting demographic takeover doesn’t sound like a sermon, but Ezra Stiles is doing something pastors have always done in public life: turning headcounts into providence. Written in the late colonial/revolutionary era, this line treats population growth as destiny and Englishness as the engine of that destiny. “Reasons for believing” borrows the posture of Enlightenment empiricism, yet the conclusion is theological in its confidence: history is moving in one direction, and it looks a lot like Stiles.

The key word is “diffusion.” It’s gentle, almost scientific, as if people and cultures disperse like ink in water. That softness masks what’s being normalized: settlement as inevitability, expansion as natural law, and the idea that “America” will be defined by the multiplying presence of Anglo-Americans. “General population of America” isn’t descriptive; it’s aspirational. Stiles is imagining a continent whose default identity is English-descended Protestant, with Indigenous peoples and non-English Europeans relegated to the margins of the story or erased from it entirely.

As a clergyman, Stiles also trades in moral legitimacy. Framing English increase as surpassing “others” carries the subtext of superiority without needing to argue it. In a new republic anxious about cohesion, demographics become a promise: if the English stock spreads widely enough, political unity and cultural dominance follow. It’s nation-building by arithmetic, sanctified by the speaker’s collar.