Little wonder that the New World of America, thus portrayed in heightened colors, proved attractive to gentlemen adventurers dreaming of personal dominion, to merchants intent upon profit, or to kings seeking revenue and prestige. The colonizing activities of the time were but incidental to the larger movement of commercial expansion and the extension of political power. The founding of the East India Company in 1600 and of the Virginia Company in 1609 were but two expressions of the same purpose: America was but one of the two Indies whose exploitation would redound at once to private advantage and to national welfare. That the individual and the state had a common and inseparable interest in the expansion of commerce and the settlement of colonies is, indeed, one of the most characteristic and significant ideas of the time: characteristic, since it pervades the literature of the period; significant, because it is an index of those profound political and economic influences that were transforming the old into the new Europe.

For at the opening of the seventeenth century the old order was fast disappearing. The ideal of a single Christian community, so long symbolized by the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Catholic Church, was losing its hold upon the minds of men as the result of the differentiation of European culture on lines of racial or national distinction. In politics this movement was embodied in the rise of the centralized national state; and the sixteenth century ushered in the era of international wars, of which the struggle between Elizabeth and Philip II was one, and one of the most important. When such conflicts were always impending, it was essential that the resources of the nation should be at the disposal of the Government. The national state could, therefore, neither share authority with the Pope at Rome, nor endure independent feudal or municipal jurisdictions within the realm; and in its military and administrative organization, feudal officers, since the thirteenth century in France and England, had been steadily replaced by paid agents appointed by the king, whose hostility to the Pope was chiefly inspired by the desire to secure from the Church the money necessary to maintain them. A well-filled treasury was thus the first need of the sixteenth-century state, and so it fell out that in western Europe the middle class—the merchant and the capitalist and the money-lender—was the chief resource of kings in conflict with feudal or ecclesiastical privilege. The prosperity of the trading class and the efficiency of the Government were thought to be inseparable; and that commerce should be regulated in the interest of the state was, therefore, the unquestioned maxim of the age.

Two things above all the interest of the state demanded: that the supply of precious metals should not diminish; and that the nation should not be dependent upon rival countries for staple commodities. The supply of gold and silver actually present in the king's coffers, or within the radius of his tax-gatherers, was of far greater moment then than now. The issues of war, in an age when credit was relatively undeveloped, were likely to depend upon it. Scarcely less important was the question of staples. To be dependent upon rivals for necessities was thought to threaten at once the prosperity of the trading class and the strength of the Government: giving hostages to the enemy in time of war and a diplomatic advantage in time of peace; carrying off the supply of gold and silver; and likely, therefore, by raising the value of money, to disorganize industry and deplete the sources of the state's revenue. To be economically self-sufficing in order to be politically independent was the cardinal doctrine. "That Realme is most compleat and wealthie which either hath sufficient to serve itselfe or can finde means to exporte of the naturall comodities [more] than it hath occasion necessarily to import," said an English writer, expressing in a phrase the essential principle of mercantilism, which, indeed, was only the old feudal or municipal ideal adapted to the needs of the national state.

A theory which crystallized the practice of two centuries must have been more than "an economic fallacy." And, indeed, in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts it was a condition and not a theory that confronted England. Many essential commodities had long been imported from countries which, toward the close of the sixteenth century, were disposed to place obstacles in the way of English trade. From Baltic lands came naval stores, and potash so necessary to the woolen industry. Mediterranean countries furnished salt, dried fruits, sugar, and the staple luxuries wine and silk. Dyes, saltpeter, and spices from the Far East were sold to English merchants by the Portuguese or the Dutch; and at exorbitant prices, for the thrifty Hollanders no sooner got control of the spice islands than they raised the price of pepper from three to eight shillings per pound. And it was the Dutch, intrenched in the European fisheries partly through favors granted by Elizabeth, who imported into England two thirds of the fish so extensively consumed by the nation.

While England was dependent upon rivals for many necessities, the foreign markets for her own products were now becoming inadequate. Apart from wool, England exported little; but the confiscation of the monasteries, the ruin of Antwerp, the rising prices resulting from the influx of silver from New Spain, contributed to stimulate English industry and to increase in some measure the volume of commodities seeking markets abroad. Yet the markets were closing in some places and becoming less accessible in others. "It is publically knowne that traffique with our neighbor countries begins to be of small request, the game seldom answering the merchant's adventure, and foraigne states either are already or at the present are preparing to inriche themselves with wool and cloth of their own which heretofore they borrowed of us." English traders were persecuted in Spain; English exports were checked by tariffs in France and by Sound dues in Denmark; privileges formerly enjoyed in German towns were being withdrawn in retaliation for the exclusion of Hanse merchants from advantages long enjoyed in London; and as for Flanders, heretofore the great mart for English wool, the civil wars had, as Hakluyt says, "spoiled the traffique there."

The desire to change this untoward condition of things was what inspired the unwarranted enthusiasm of the time for American and Indian colonization. The voyages of Willoughby and Frobisher, seeking some northeast or northwest passage, were but the prelude to the later voyages by way of the Cape of Good Hope and to the foundation of the East India Company, the specific purpose of which was to procure the products of the Orient independently of the Dutch and at lower cost. The colonization of America it was supposed would serve a similar purpose. It was still thought to be rich in precious metals; its soil well adapted to commodities now purchased in the Levant. Its waters would furnish England with the herring now purchased of the Dutch, and its forests would make her independent of the Baltic countries for naval supplies. Once gain a footing in India and America, and the commerce of England, now so largely foreign, would be diverted into national channels to the benefit of all concerned: "Our monies and wares that nowe run into the hands of our adversaries or cowld frendes shall pass into our frendes and naturall kinsmen and from them likewise we shall receive such things as shall be most available to our necessities, which intercourse of trade maye rather be called a home bread traffique than a forraigne exchange."

The identification of the industrial and political interests of the nation with the fortunes of the centralized state was necessarily accompanied by a marked change in the character of international trade. The national king, whose power rested so largely upon the industrial class, could not leave in the hands of municipal councils the control which they had formerly exercised; while long ocean voyages, and traffic with countries inhabited by alien and often hostile people, required the combined capital of many men and a more powerful backing than any municipal council could furnish. Individual trading, therefore, gave way to corporate trading; the joint-stock company, assisted or controlled by the state, replaced the individual merchant operating under municipal encouragement and protection. It was accordingly in the age of Elizabeth, when English merchants were lamenting the want of markets, and when English ships were pushing into every part of the world, that such chartered trading companies made their appearance in rapid succession, taking their names from the distant regions in which they obtained a monopoly—Cathay, the Baltic, Turkey, Morocco, Africa. Of these, and of all subsequent organizations of a similar character, the most famous in England was the East India Company. By the charter, which bears date December 31, 1600, two hundred and fifteen knights and merchants were incorporated into a self-governing association competent to acquire property in land, and enjoying a monopoly of English trade with all countries lying east of the Cape of Good Hope as far as the Straits of Magellan. The laws of the company were required to conform to those of England, and its officers to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown. Encountering many obstacles and some serious reverses, the Company soon established a thriving trade in the Indian Ocean; its great East Indiamen acquired a fame unique in the annals of commerce; and the corporation itself, with privileges confirmed and extended by Charles II, was destined in the eighteenth century to be the chief instrument in the establishment of England's Indian Empire.

IV

When English knights and merchants set out to establish colonies in the New World, two familiar institutions were convenient to the purpose—the proprietary feudal grant, and the chartered trading company; noblemen ambitious for personal dominion turned naturally to the former, while merchants intent upon profits turned as naturally to the latter. The first hapless ventures in American planting, dominated by the idealistic and militant temper of the Elizabethan age, were initiated and directed in the spirit of the gentleman adventurer: in the spirit of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who identified America with the fabled Atlantis and lost his life in a pathetic attempt to establish an English colony in Newfoundland; in the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose famous lost colony, settled in the year 1587, exhausted his fortune and disappeared at last, leaving no trace. These men were less interested in profit than in reputation; less intent upon commercial expansion than on the extension of the queen's dominions. But their resources were too limited, their ideals too little practical for the realization of their dreams. The patents to Gilbert and Raleigh took the form of a grant of lordship by feudal tenure; and from the papers left by the former we can create again, even to details, his vision of a transformed wilderness, America's future state: an America of extensive proprietary domains; an America reproducing, in its lords and landed gentry surrounded by freeholder and tenant, in its counties and boroughs and parishes, the social and political aristocracy of old England.

The proprietary feudal grant was destined to play its part in the colonization of America, but the resplendent vision of Gilbert did not survive the reign of Elizabeth. Raleigh was the last of the great Elizabethan adventurers, and with the accession of the pedantic James I the New World was beginning to be regarded in the dry light of a commercial opportunity. To the knights and merchants who had witnessed the vain efforts of Gilbert and Raleigh, the chartered company seemed better adapted to their purposes than the proprietary grant. The methods that had proved fortunate in the Old World would doubtless prove equally so in the New; and in the year 1609, men who were already netting one hundred per cent profit from their investments in the India Company were prepared to venture something in a solid business scheme to exploit the resources of America.

A tentative scheme, failing for want of efficient organization, had already been set on foot. Three years earlier, in 1606, James had been induced to license sundry of his loving subjects "to deduce and conduct two several colonies or plantations in America." Among those active in the undertaking were Bartholomew Gosnold, recently returned from a Western voyage, Richard Hakluyt, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Edward Maria Wingfield, a London merchant. Though not incorporated, the patentees were formed into two companies, the London Company, so called because its members were mainly London merchants, and the Plymouth Company, consisting mainly of merchants from Plymouth and the west of England. Each company was permitted to establish one colony having a jurisdiction one hundred miles along the coast and one hundred miles inland; the London Company anywhere between 34 deg. and 41 deg., the Plymouth Company anywhere between 38 deg. and 45 deg., north latitude; provided only that no colony should be located within one hundred miles of one already established. The patent provided that there should be in each colony, for managing its affairs, a resident council of thirteen members which was to take instructions from the Royal Council for Virginia, a body of fourteen men—afterwards enlarged—residing in England and appointed and controlled by the king. The patentees were permitted to trade freely within the limits designated by the grant, and to enjoy the customs dues exacted from other Englishmen and from foreigners who might wish to compete with them.

After a single vain attempt to establish a colony at Sagadahoc, the Plymouth Company confined its activities to trade and exploration within the region to which John Smith in 1614 gave the name of New England. Sir Fernando Gorges was one of the patentees actively interested in these ventures; and in 1620 he procured, for himself and associates to the number of forty, a charter which transformed the old company into a close corporation under the title of the New England Council or Corporation for New England. Upon the patentees the charter conferred the sole right to trade, to grant title to land, and to establish and govern colonies within the region between 40 deg. and 48 deg., north latitude, in America. The New England Council possessed neither the capital nor the popular support necessary for engaging in colonizing ventures; and during the fifteen years of its existence it did little but sublet to others the rights which it possessed. Of the council's land grants, of which there were many both to individuals and to corporations, and which, often conflicting, furnished the grounds for innumerable future disputes, four only are important as the basis of permanent colonies in New England. The territory at Plymouth was granted to the Pilgrims in 1621; in 1628 the territory between the Merrimac and the Charles Rivers was conveyed to the Company of Massachusetts Bay; and two grants made in 1629, of territory between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua to John Mason, of territory between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec to Fernando Gorges, mark the beginnings of the colonies of New Hampshire and Maine. All its ventures profited the New England Council nothing. February 3, 1635, the territory within its jurisdiction was parceled out among the patentees, and on June 7, its charter of fruitless privileges was surrendered.

It was reserved for the London Company to begin the planting of the first American commonwealth; but it was by happy chances rather than by wise foresight in the promoters that the colony outlived the company. The first comers, who were set down at Jamestown in 1607, would soon have perished but for the harsh good sense of the redoubtable Captain John Smith; and two years' experience with the wilderness and the Indian, with dissensions among settlers and councillors, demonstrated that the patent was unsuited to the purposes for which it had been granted. More colonists were needed in the colony, more capital required to transport and maintain them, more authority to direct and control them. To meet these needs, a charter was obtained in 1609 which created an incorporated joint-stock company under the title of "The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia." Shares were offered for subscription, to be paid for in money by the adventurers who remained in England, and in personal service by the planters who went to the colony. Each shareholder, whether adventurer or planter, was a member of the company, and was to receive such dividends as his shares might earn. The undertaking was widely advertised; and when the charter passed the seals, shares had been subscribed by 659 individuals, including 21 peers, 96 knights, 58 gentlemen, 110 merchants, and 282 citizens, and by 56 of the companies of the City of London.

The affairs of the new company were to be managed by a treasurer and council, resident in England, and appointed and controlled by the freemen assembled in general court. The little colony in Virginia was but an adjunct to the company, and its management was left, without other than conventional and perfunctory restrictions, to the treasurer and council, subject to the approval of the freemen. The first treasurer was Sir Thomas Smythe, who was also the first president of the East India Company, a great merchant in his day, whose influence in Virginia was a predominant one until he was succeeded as treasurer by Edwin Sandys in 1618. Smythe and his associates were little interested in the transmission of English institutions to the New World. They did not regard Virginia, as the historian is apt to do, in the interesting light of an experiment in constitutional liberalism, or conceive of the company as the mother of nations. Their object was to pay dividends to the shareholders, and the colonist was expected to exploit the resources of Virginia for the benefit of the company of which he was a member. Virginia was in fact a plantation owned by the company; its settlers were the company's servants, freely transported in its vessels, fed and housed at its expense, the product of their labor at its disposal for the benefit of all concerned.

With these ideas in mind, and enlightened by past experience, the company appointed Sir Thomas Gates to be "sole and absolute Governor," and sent him out in 1609, together with five hundred settlers in nine ships. Two vessels were wrecked, and what with plague and fever less than half the new colonists ever reached Virginia. The governor was himself stranded on the Bermudas; and when he finally arrived after nine months, sixty starving settlers were found scattered along the James River. Men who had been reduced to eating their dead comrades or the putrid flesh of buried Indians were scarcely good material for regenerating a feeble plantation. Sir Thomas Gates, therefore, decided to abandon the colony. But by a happy chance, as he was sailing with the survivors down the river, he met Lord de la Warr come from England with fresh supplies and new recruits; whereupon he turned back, still hoping to retrieve the desperate fortunes of Virginia.

The decision proved wise in the event. But it was doubtless due to the drastic measures of the company that the misfortunes of previous years were not repeated. The governor returned to England, leaving the colony in the hands of De la Warr, who governed in the spirit of the instructions issued to Gates at the time of his appointment. Popularly known as "Dale's Laws," the regulations under which Virginia was finally made self-supporting were published by Gates after his return in 1611, under the title of "Articles, Laws and Orders, Divine, Politique, and Martial for the Government of Virginia." The new code was based upon the military laws of the Netherlands, and was enforced in the spirit with which the experience of Gates and Dale had made them familiar. From blasphemy to disrespect, from murder to idleness or embezzlement of the common store, the company's servants were liable to meet the knife, the lash, or the gallows at every turn. Until 1618 the regime of martial law was maintained; and the settlers stood guard or marched to the fields at the word of command, scarcely aware, doubtless, that they had been granted all the liberties enjoyed by men "born within this our realm of England."

The military regime which made Virginia self-supporting did not make it prosperous, or profitable to the company. In December, 1618, after an expenditure of L80,000 sterling, there were in the colony "600 persons, men, women and children, and cattle three hundred att the most. And the Company was then lefte in debt neer five thousand pounds." The hard-headed Smythe saw little prospect of the dividends which the shareholders were demanding; and he was ready to give way to any one who still had faith to sink yet more money in the enterprise that for a dozen years had disappointed every expectation. Such an idealist was Sir Edwin Sandys. Son of a Puritan Archbishop of York, he had studied at Oxford under Richard Hooker, whose famous book he had read in manuscript. The Ecclesiastical Polity had perhaps confirmed Sandys in a republican way of thinking; and in the year 1618 he was probably a nonconformist—a "religious gentleman," as Edward Winslow called him: at all events, a man of humanitarian and anti-prerogative instincts; a friend of the Earl of Southampton, and leader of those in the company who were in sympathy with the rising tide of liberal sentiment in English politics.

The liberal policy which Sandys favored in England, he was now prepared to adopt for the management of Virginia. Convinced that the military and joint-stock regime, even if it had ever served a useful purpose, was retarding the development of the colony, Sandys and Southampton determined to reverse the policy of their predecessors by instituting private property in land and conceding a measure of self-government. A popular assembly was accordingly established in 1619; restrictions on conduct and religious opinion were relaxed; and land grants, both to individuals and to corporations, in small and large tracts, were made on easy terms. It was hoped that an appeal to self-respect and to self-interest would encourage immigration and foster thrift and industry. When Sandys became treasurer in 1618 the time seemed propitious; for it had already been discovered that Virginia tobacco could be sold at a profit in London; and it was the expectation of Sandys, by obtaining for the company its fair share of the profit arising from the importation of tobacco into England, to repay to the shareholders the long-delayed interest on their investments.

The scheme was not without great possibilities, and the company spared neither money nor effort to make it a success. Within three years more than thirty-five hundred emigrants crossed to Virginia. In 1621 the expenditures of the company had reached a total of L100,000, and in 1624 the amount had been doubled. Yet, quite apart from the high death-rate which depleted the colony, or the Indian massacre of 1622 which threatened its existence, all the efforts of Sandys ended in failure. Drawn into the main current of English politics, the Virginia Company was unable to live in those troubled waters. James regarded with little favor the liberalism which Sandys and Southampton were promoting in England as well as in America. On high moral grounds he disliked the use of tobacco, and for economic and fiscal reasons was opposed to its cultivation in Virginia. He was determined, at all events, that such profits as might arise from its importation should enrich the royal exchequer rather than a powerful corporation controlled by men who were carping at the king's prerogative. And the king found support in the company itself; for Smythe and Warwick turned against the corporation and furnished pretexts to prove that it had betrayed its trust and should forfeit its rights. In 1624 the charter was accordingly annulled, and Virginia became a royal province.

Thus ended the most serious attempt of a commercial company to make profit out of American planting. Famous and successful in the annals of colonization, it proved a complete disaster as a financial speculation. During the reign of Charles I, merchants were therefore but little disposed to venture their money in enterprises of that kind. Nor was Charles himself, who guarded the royal prerogative more jealously even than James had done, likely to look with favor upon the creation of corporations which would prove useless in case of failure and might prove dangerous if they succeeded. The rough sea of politics in the time of the second Stuart was unsuited to floating successful colonial ventures of any kind under governmental sanction; but in so far as he was disposed to further the development of America, it was natural enough for Charles, who found that his usurping Parliament was backed by the mercantile interest, to frown upon colonial corporations, and to make use of the proprietary feudal grant as a means of rewarding the courtiers and nobles who supported him. The very year that the New England Council surrendered its charter, Archbishop Laud was urging the king to recall that of Massachusetts Bay. It was a few years later that Fernando Gorges was made Lord Proprietor of Maine; a few years earlier that Lord Baltimore, a loyal supporter of the House of Stuart, received a feudal grant after the manner of the Durham Palatinate of that part of Virginia which was to be known as the Province of Maryland.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The best accounts of early exploration and settlement in America are in Channing's History of the United States, I, chaps. III-VII; and Bourne's Spain in America, chaps, VI-IX. An admirable account of the activities of English seamen in the sixteenth century is given by Walter Raleigh in volume XII of his edition of Hakluyt's Voyages. An interesting contemporary narrative of Drake's voyage around the world is in Hakluyt's Voyages (Raleigh ed.), XI, pp. 101-33. Hakluyt's Discourse on Western Plantinge is in the Maine Historical Society Collections, series II, vol. II. For the rise of the chartered trading companies, and their connection with early American colonizing companies, see Cheyney's Background of American History, chaps. VII-VIII. The best discussion of the English interest in colonization at the opening of the seventeenth century is in Beer's The Origins of the British Colonial System, chaps. I-III. The most elaborate and learned account of the colonies in the seventeenth century is that of Osgood, The American Colonies in the 17th Century, 3 vols. Macmillan, 1904. The most readable account of the founding of Virginia is in Fiske's Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, I chaps. I-VI. John Smith's account of the settlement of Jamestown is in his True Relation, printed in Arber, Works of Captain John Smith. Birmingham, 1884.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Pesos=approximately $3.00.



CHAPTER III

THE ENGLISH MIGRATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

They are too delicate and unfitte to beginne new Plantations and Collonies, that cannot endure the biting of a muskeeto.

WILLIAM BRADFORD.

To authorize an untruth, by toleration of State, is to build a sconce against the Walls of Heaven, to batter God out of his chair.

The Cobler of Aggawam.

I have often wondered in my younger dayes how the Pope came to such a height of arogancie, but since I came to New England I have perceived the height of that tripple crowne, and also the depth of that sea.

SAMUEL GORTON.

I

Those who looked to America for great financial profit or immediate political advantage were disappointed. The seventeenth century had run half its course before the colonies became an important asset to the English Government: no gold came from them to enrich its treasury, few supplies to furnish its navy, while the revenue, derived from its slowly growing trade was insignificant. Equally deceptive was the New World as a field for corporate exploitation. The sagacity of Thomas Smythe and the idealism of Edwin Sandys were alike unavailing. Before the Virginia Company was dissolved in 1624 it had sunk nearly two hundred thousand pounds in its venture "withoutt returne either of profitt or of any part of the principall"; and in 1660 Lord Baltimore, whose colony was well established, was himself living in straitened circumstances.

Yet within sixty years after the Susan Constant entered the James River, seven colonies were firmly planted on the coast of North America: Virginia and Maryland to the south; Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, Connecticut and Rhode Island, in New England; and between the two groups of English settlements was the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the Hudson. Within the limits of these colonies dwelt a population of more than seventy thousand people, economically self-sufficing, possessed of well-defined political institutions and clearly marked types of social and intellectual life. The English migration and the founding of the English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in America were different from those which statesmen and traders had imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the wilderness, and by the wilderness itself—the circumstances which, in the new country, closed them round.

The motives which induced many Englishmen to come to America in the seventeenth century must be sought in the profound social changes occurring in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts. The high hopes with which the Virginia Company looked forward to successful colonization were partly inspired by the prevailing belief that England was overpopulated. There was much to justify the belief. The reign of Elizabeth witnessed a striking increase in the number of unemployed, the poverty-stricken, and the vagabond. The destruction of the monasteries left the poor and defenseless without their accustomed sources of relief; while steadily rising prices, due partly to the increased supply of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves, "rogues and sturdy beggars."

That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful colonization, said the author of Nova Britannia in 1609, but two things are essential, people and money; and "for the first wee need not doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions." Yet for more than a decade one of the chief difficulties of the Virginia Company was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had "to take any that could be got of any sort on any terms." Little wonder that the colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the regulations of martial law.

The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock regime; for "when our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how." The first step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir Thomas Dale "allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of farms." It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most honest men, when working for the company, "would take so much pains in a weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day." The first general distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the "head right" was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one to five shillings was usually sufficient to secure title to fifty acres, and in 1705 the practice was legalized. Titles so secured were burdened with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never paid.

A greater incentive to settlement than free land was the discovery of a crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been anticipated, and in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing the leaf, sold a cargo of native tobacco in London at a profit, the future of Virginia was assured. Neither the plans of the company nor the scruples of the king could prevail against the force of economic self-interest. Twenty thousand pounds were exported in 1619, forty thousand in 1622, sixty thousand in 1624. Tobacco became at once, and in spite of long opposition on the part of the home Government remained, the chief enterprise of the colony. Virginia was founded on tobacco, and like the other Southern colonies, sacrificed everything to the raising of her most important commodity; and for Virginia, as for the other Southern colonies, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of her great staple were of determining influence in the development of her social institutions.

Those who were interested in the Virginia Company loudly proclaimed that the recall of the charter would ruin the colony. But it was population, rather than corporate or royal control, that Virginia needed, and the profits from tobacco proved a more powerful incentive to large families and immigration than all the efforts of king or company. Within a decade after 1624 the number of settlers increased from 1232 to 5000. In 1649 the population had reached 15,000, and in 1670 it stood at 38,000. Land was virtually free to those who could pay for the cost of clearing, and the rich soil of the tide-water bottoms assured an easy living and the prospect of accumulating a competence. As the conditions of life grew easier, the Virginians, with the true instinct of frontiersmen, described America as God's country, abounding in every good thing: "Seldom any that hath continued in Virginia any time will or do desire to live in England, but put back with what expedition they can." The glowing accounts which reached England appealed to those of every class whose straitened circumstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and whose children would always remain yeomen; the lawyer and the physician, the merchant and the clergyman, ambitious to become landowners and play the gentleman; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were no assured avenues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World. Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of economic and social enfranchisement.

Since the main road to wealth and influence in Virginia was the raising of tobacco, every emigrant with capital to invest at once became a landowner; and the conditions of tobacco-planting disposed him to enlarge his estate as rapidly as possible. It is true that one advantage of tobacco over other products was its high acreage value. But the price ordinarily was low, and many acres were necessary for large net returns. Besides, the soil was soon exhausted, so that the successful planter found it necessary to be always acquiring new land in order to let the old lie fallow. It thus happened that, in spite of the cost of clearing and the danger from the Indians, Virginia was not settled, as its founders had intended, in compact towns modeled upon the English borough, but in widely separated plantation groups, stretching far up on both sides of the James River. The average size of patents granted before 1649 was about four hundred and fifty acres; in the period between 1666 and 1679 the average had risen to nearly nine hundred, while there were ten patents ranging from ten to twenty thousand acres each. By 1685 a total population not exceeding that of the London parish of Stepney had acquired title to an area as large as all England.

For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was essential. In Virginia, and in all the Southern colonies with the exception of North Carolina, there accordingly existed, side by side with the landowning planter class, and sharply distinct from it, a servile laboring class which formed a large part of the total population. In 1619, we are told, "came a Dutch man of war with 20 negars." The ship was probably English rather than Dutch. In either case the circumstance marks the beginning of African slavery in the English continental colonies; but the importation of slaves was slight until the close of the century, and the laborers who cleared the forests and worked the fields were largely supplied by contract, and were known as "servants." The servant was a person bound over for a term of years to the planter who paid his transportation or purchased the contract right from its original owner. The term of service varied from two to seven years, at the expiration of which the servant became a freeman. Ex-servants sometimes migrated to other colonies, notably to North Carolina after the foundation of that colony, or in the next century to the up-country beyond the "fall line"; but many became renters or tenants on the estates of the large planters, or in time became planters themselves. The servant class included some condemned criminals and political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the almshouses, or the London streets. They were the unfortunate and the dispossessed rather than the vicious—men who were vagabonds because there was nothing for them to do, or petty thieves because they were starving. They were, none the less, an inferior and a servile class. The colonial law made no great distinction between the servant for life and the servant for a term of years; during the term of his indenture, the latter was subject to his master, driven and whipped like the negro slave with whom he worked and ate and with whom he was classed.

Less clearly defined than the distinction between the free and the unfree was the distinction, which began to develop toward the middle of the century, and which was doubtless accentuated by the Cavalier migration from England during the Commonwealth period, between the small and the large landowner. The master of a great estate, enjoying a certain leisure and exercising a political and social influence denied to the average freeman, was set above the mass of the planters much as in England the titled nobility was set above the gentry. Of this small but important class, the first William Byrd was a notable example. Uniting in his ancestry the Cavalier and the Roundhead traditions, he inherited, before the age of twenty, 1800 acres of land and a recognized social position in the colony. Before his death he had built up an estate of 26,000 acres, which his son, in the next century, increased to 179,000 acres. He was at once planter, merchant, politician, and social leader. His caravans of from fifty to one hundred pack-horses penetrated regularly for many years to the Cherokee country beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. The furs which they brought back, together with the products of his plantation, were exported to England and elsewhere in payment for slaves, servants, or other commodities which were periodically landed at his private wharf to be used on his own estate or retailed from his general store to the small planters roundabout. Before he reached the age of thirty, Byrd became, and remained throughout his life, a leader in his own county and in the colony at large—a colonel of militia, a burgess in the assembly, and member of the governor's council.

From the middle of the century Virginia society thus began to take on the character which it retained throughout the colonial period. The colony was primarily a rural and an agricultural community, combining in curious fashion the democratic spirit of the frontier with the aristocratic temper of an older civilization. The unit of social organization was the plantation, which naturally tended to become, and in the case of the larger plantations often became in fact, relatively complete and self-sufficing—a little world in itself. The planter, surrounded by his family and his servants and cut off from intimate or frequent contact with his neighbors, producing, for the most part in abundance, all the necessities and many of the luxuries of life, was master of his entourage and but little dependent upon the outside world. Inevitably the conditions of plantation life developed the aristocratic spirit, the sense of mastery and independence which comes from directing inferiors in an isolated and self-sufficing enterprise.

Influences of environment were strengthened by the traditions which the settlers had inherited. Neither planter nor servant came to America with utopian ideals of society or government. It was discontent not dissent that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for themselves. And so it happened that the laborer and the farmer, the small landowner and the master of a great estate, the clergyman and the high official, were disposed to take as a matter of course the position which custom assigned them, and in that position to exercise the authority and render the obedience which was proper to it.

Tradition and environment thus conspired to establish a government in which initiative and leadership fell to the great planters, while the mass of the freemen exercised a restrained and limited supervision. It was a happy accident, rather than any strong popular demand, that gave to Virginia an elected chamber. Sir Edwin Sandys and the Earl of Southampton, who gained control of the Virginia Company in 1618, hoped to put the enterprise on a paying basis by lavish land grants and liberal concessions in respect to religious and political liberty. Governor Yeardley was accordingly sent out in 1619 with instructions to call together "two Burgesses from each Plantation, freely to be elected by the inhabitants thereof." In June of the same year twenty-two burgesses, representing eleven districts, together with the governor and council, assembled in the church at Jamestown and inaugurated representative government in Virginia by passing a body of laws in which the customs of England were adapted to the conditions of a frontier community. After the dissolution of the company in 1624 the appointment of the governor and council vested in the Crown, but the House of Burgesses, elected at first by the freemen, but after the Restoration on the basis of a freehold test, was continued. From the first the assembly, filled by planters, exercised a beneficial influence in giving a practical character to the laws of the province; while on certain occasions, and notably during the period of the Commonwealth, it was the dominant influence in the government of the colony.

But for the most part the assembly was the instrument rather than the source of power. The directing influence was usually in the hands of the great planter who combined the functions of merchant and country gentleman, lawyer and politician and social leader. His knowledge of law and his familiarity with affairs, his social connection and influence, his greater leisure, the traditional authority which hung about his position, all disposed the small planters to accept his initiative and abide by his decisions. It was difficult to defeat his candidate for the burgesses; difficult for the elected burgess not to defer to his opinion. And if the great planters were influential among the burgesses, they were predominant in the council. The home Government expected the governor to manage the affairs of the colony by gathering to his support the most wealthy and influential men in it. Accordingly, the great planters were customarily appointed to the local offices and to the council. Generally speaking, the governor and the great planters established a community of interest on an exchange of favors. The small group of men in the council, related by marriage, ambitious, shrewd, and pushing, already wealthy or bound to become so, supported with reasonable loyalty the royal interests, and found their reward in exploiting, through the political machinery which they controlled, the resources of the colony for their own profit. This compact was the basis of the long regime of Berkeley. But the governor was made aware of the source of his strength when he trespassed upon the preserves of the oligarchy which supported him. His attempt to control the Indian trade drove men like Colonel Byrd over to the side of Bacon, and the authority of the governor collapsed like a pricked balloon.

Of this oligarchy of politician-planters, Colonel Byrd was indeed the most notable. Already wealthy and influential, in 1687 he went to London and secured, through the favor of William Blathwayt, the office of receiver-general of the customs, to which was attached the office of escheator; offices, among the most important in the colony, which he held until his death. It was the duty of the receiver to receive the quit-rents, and to receive them, at the option of the taxpayer, in tobacco in exchange for certificates at the rate of about eight shillings per hundredweight. Tobacco so received was stored in warehouses, and sold at the close of the year by the receiver-general for the benefit of the customs. The tobacco offered for the quit-rents was naturally of inferior quality. Such as it was, the king favored selling it at auction. But the Virginia assembly preferred to have the receiver dispose of it by "private arrangement"; and in fact Colonel Byrd found it convenient to make such "private arrangements" with burgesses or members of the council, who sometimes paid as much as six shillings for tobacco which would bring ten or twelve in the open market.

Members of the legislature who profited by such practices were doubtless willing to stretch a point in favor of the receiver of the customs. In 1679, before he had become receiver, Colonel Byrd was able to obtain from the assembly, on condition of maintaining fifty armed men to repel Indian attacks on the frontier, a grant of ten thousand acres at the Falls extending on both sides of the James River. The grant was disallowed in England, but other grants of great value were obtained with little difficulty. Patents were easily obtained, but they did not become effective until the land was "settled" by clearing and cultivating a minimum tract. For a poor man this was the chief obstacle to acquiring a great estate; but a rich man was often able to avoid it altogether. In 1688, Byrd secured a patent for 3313 acres. He failed to "settle" it and the title lapsed. But the land could not be granted again until the lapse of title was officially declared in the office of the escheator. Colonel Byrd was fortunately escheator as well as receiver, and the lapse of his own title was not declared until 1701, when the same tract was immediately repatented to Nathaniel Harrison, who straightway transferred it to his neighbor and very good friend, the original patentee. In like manner the colonel preempted 5644 acres of land, which he held without improvement for ten years when it was transferred to his son.

The aristocracy, of which Colonel Byrd was a shining light, nevertheless held by a somewhat precarious tenure. The crude and primitive conditions of the wilderness, restricting both the occupations and the diversions of life within narrow limits, inevitably ran the thoughts of men in much the same mould. The routine of work and pleasure was much the same on the great plantation as on the small: clearing and planting, spinning and weaving, dancing and horse-racing, neighborly hospitality which was generous and sincere because the opportunity to exercise it was rare, attendance at church or at the county court, at elections, at the annual muster—it was a range of activities too limited to permit of any deep-seated sense of difference between man and man.

And, indeed, the main basis of distinction in this new world was a purely external one—the possession of wealth; and wealth was in no unreal sense the bequest of nature to capacity. Initiative and industry, rather than the dead hand of custom, marked a man for distinction and preferment. It was the land of opportunity where the servant could become the farmer, the farmer a planter, where the planter, acquiring by skill or happy chance a great estate, thereby entered in with the political and social grandees. There were classes but no castes; not birth or title, but individual enterprise determined rank and influence. And in an undeveloped country the possession of a great estate was not a social grievance, but an evidence of success in the perennial contest with nature, the measure of personal prowess and a test of civic virtue. The enrichment of Colonel Byrd, even by ways that were devious, was viewed with complacence by his neighbors so long as it harmed them not. Yet the submission of the small to the great planter was a convenience rather than a necessity. The wilderness, with the Indian as a part of it, developed a crude and a ruthless spirit, but never a cringing or a submissive one. The gentleman and the magistrate were deferred to, but neither was regarded as sacrosanct; and when, in the regime of Berkeley, special privilege in alliance with official corruption seemed to be narrowing the chances of the common man, the insurgent spirit of frontier democracy, denying the validity of distinctions and demanding fair play, found militant expression in Bacon's Rebellion. The episode was an early instance of that struggle between rich and poor, between exploiter and exploited, of that stubborn insistence upon equal opportunity which have so often characterized the more decisive periods of American history.

II

The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the Protestant Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no formula is adequate to convey the full meaning. From one point of view it was the nationalization of the Church, the subjection of the ecclesiastical to the lay power. In the end the principle of territorial sovereignty everywhere prevailed, in Catholic no less than in Protestant countries: whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church submitted to the principle of cujus regio ejus religio, and became an instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose was to transfer the ultimate authority in conduct and thought from the divinely appointed priest to the divinely appointed king.

But the Reformation was far more than resistance to Rome. It did not cease when the king triumphed over the Pope. The "dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion" was as incompatible with royal as with priestly authority. In this "reformation of the Reformation" the strength of the movement was everywhere in the towns. It was generally true, and nowhere more so than in England, that Protestantism was the result of a middle-class revolt against the existing regime, a denial of established standards in politics and morality, the determined attempt to effect a transvaluation of all customary values.

The quarrel of the middle-class man with the world as he found it was of long standing. In the feudal-ecclesiastical structure, fairly complete in the eleventh century and to outward seeming still intact in the fifteenth, there was no prepared niche for the bourgeois. The peasant to obey and serve; the noble to fight and rule; the priest to instruct and pray:—these, all in their different ways respected and respectable careers, completed the sum of God's purpose in arranging the occupations of men. Yet into this trinity the bourgeois had intruded his unwelcome presence. The secret of his rise was the skill of his hand to fashion material things, and his practical intelligence to care for them. Neither personal service nor personal prowess was the source of his power. Untouched by the principle of homage or of noblesse oblige, he commanded, or was himself commanded, through the medium of material values. He put money in his purse because it was the measure of his independence, the symbol of his worth; and he kept it there, guarding it as the priest guarded his faith or the noble his honor. Long occupation with the concrete world of affairs had given his mind a peculiar quality; his intelligence was direct and firm, his thinking clear and dry, without atmosphere, unrelieved by poetic imagination or the play of fancy.

Set apart by occupation and temperament, the middle-class man had little in common with either the servile or the ruling class; little in common with the noble who despised his birth, ridiculed his manners, envied his wealth; little with the priest who found him too rigid, too intelligent, too reserved with his money and his soul to be a good son of the Church; little with the peasant who renounced him as a renegade or ignored him as a parvenu. All these benefits the bourgeois returned in full measure, despising the peasant for his ignorance and servility resenting the inquisitiveness of the clergy and the condescension of the nobility, at the same time that he aspired to the power of the one and the superior position of the other. And from the outside world the bourgeois had secured a measure of protection. With his money he had purchased corporate independence and enfranchisement from feudal obligation. The gild, at once an industrial enterprise, a religious association, and a charitable foundation, bound him to his fellows and rounded out his life.

At the close of the fifteenth century many circumstances had contributed to identify the interests of the small country gentry with those of the moderately well-to-do townsman, and to set them both in opposition to the higher nobility and the wealthier merchants and promoters. The control of trade was passing from the master merchant to the capitalist, from the city to the state. Powerful financial monopolists like the Fuggers and the Welsers, in alliance with the territorial prince or the national government, were undermining the industrial independence of town and gild. Exactions of State and Church were increasing. The growing extravagance and immorality of the wealthy, both burgher and noble, was matched by the worldliness of the upper clergy, and accompanied by the decay of spiritual interests, the accentuation of ritual and ceremony, and increased reliance upon external and formal works as sufficient for salvation. From this world of the high-placed favorites of fortune, where corruption flourished unashamed and power was too often exercised without a redeeming sense of obligation, the middle class was already withdrawing at the close of the fifteenth century. The townsmen in Germany found satisfaction for their spiritual and intellectual interests in reviving the religious activities of the gilds, and in the formation of lay religious societies in which a simplified form of worship was accompanied by study of the Bible and the preaching of the unworldly virtues of upright living. It was this separation of the bourgeois from the world in which he lived that constitutes the first protest, the beginning of the Protestant movement.

Ideal constructions are doubtless the psychic precipitates of social experience, and the Protestant theory was but the reasoned expression of the middle-class state of mind. Thwarted by the existing world of fact, the leaders employed their practical and dexterous intelligence to create a new world of semblance, a world of the spirit, in which the way was illumined by the light of reason, and the individual rather than the social conscience gave the sense of right direction. Material for such a philosophy was ready to hand. The practice and the thinking of the apostolic churches had been newly discovered by the study of the secular and the sacred past; and the essence of all Protestant thinking was implied in the phrase in which Luther embodied the teaching of St. Paul: "Good works do not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Not the conventional judgments of society, expressed through the commands of Church or State, but the individual conscience, justified by faith in God's purpose, determines a man's merit. St. Augustine's ideal City of God was thus once more set over against the visible secular world of man. Into this intangible community, a house not made with hands, the elect and the select withdrew themselves, abiding there as in a refuge, untouched by the corruptions of a spotted world, seeking with humility the will of God and submitting with all the pride of conscious merit to law.

As the middle-class experience implied the Protestant theory of religion, it implied the Puritan conception of morals and conduct. Puritanism originated in the towns for the same reason that it lingers in the country; it was formerly the townsman rather than the countryman whose ideas and manner of living stamped him as peculiar. The spiritual and social isolation of the townsman is therefore the source of the outward impassiveness of the Puritan, as well as of the intensity of his inner experience: the continued impact of noble or priestly contempt had crusted his nature with a manner that was rigid and resistant and undemonstrative, beneath which smouldered the explosive forces of thwarted ambition and the sense of unrecognized intellectual and moral excellence. Conscious of a worth which society ignored, he transformed his qualities into virtues, and erected his virtues into social standards of value. Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved endurance of the pricks of fortune—these became the virtues of the Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and passed judgment on the society in which he felt himself an alien and a stranger.

Opposition was therefore but fuel to the Puritan flame. Every persecution of society or obstacle of nature encountered in the endeavor to withdraw from the world was a confirmation of its corruption, a device of the devil to tempt him astray, or God's wise method of testing his faith. To persevere was the very proof of his election, the sure evidence of right thinking. The doctrine of eternal torment in hell, said Jonathan Edwards, used to appear "like a horrible doctrine to me. I remember very well when I seemed convinced, and fully satisfied, but never could give an account how, or by what means I was thus convinced." The very painfulness of the idea was doubtless what induced him to accept it. It was not the truth of the doctrine convincing his intellect, but the discipline of the will involved in vanquishing the horror of it, that gave him peace; so that in the end it seemed to him, not so much true, but "exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet." St. Augustine furnished us one of the keys to Puritanism when he said: "No man loves what he endures, but he may love to endure." The Puritan loved to endure. To expect resistance and to meet it unmoved; to welcome calumny and reviling with a steadfast mind; to transform a hostile verdict of the majority into an unconscious award of merit:—such was the Puritan temper in its most distinguished representatives.

III

In England the Puritan temper was given its effective edge during the latter years of Elizabeth and the reigns of the first Stuarts. The Armada was scarcely destroyed before the queen assumed a less complaisant attitude toward dissent. James I warned the clergy at Hampden Court that he would make them conform or harry them out of the land. The third decade of the century witnessed the triumph of Anti-Christ on every hand: in Germany the success of imperial arms was crowned by the Edict of Restitution; with the capture of Rochelle, the Huguenots in France lost their towns of refuge and found themselves at the mercy of the state; and in England itself the first Charles, more absolutist and more Catholic than his father, was thought to aim at nothing less than the ruin of Parliament and the restoration of the Roman religion. Under the stress of opposition there was accordingly a marked accentuation of the Puritan and the Separatist spirit. To Nonconformist and Independent alike the truth became more clear the more it was traduced and maligned. Year by year there was a deepening sense of being in the world but not of it; and to those who were already spiritual exiles, the idea of removing to America came to seem but the outward expression of an inner fact: "All the churches of Europe have been brought under desolation; it maybe feared that the like judgements are coming upon us; and who knows but God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many, whom he meanes to save out of the generall callamitie."

It was not the Puritan Nonconformists who first sought refuge on American shores, but a less aggressive people, who were called Brownists in derision, but who called themselves Separatists. Robert Browne first formulated the doctrines of the sect; but its origin, and the reasons for its persistence in the face of bitter persecution, are not altogether clear. Poor in purse and feeble in numbers, Separatism found adherents chiefly in London and Norfolk, and among the lower classes of artisans and countrymen. It was in London and Norfolk that many thousand Dutch refugees found homes during the reign of Elizabeth; and it was in Norfolk that a kind of unofficial, lay religion had been for many decades a marked feature of craft gild activities. Dutch influence and the practice of the gilds may have furnished a fruitful soil for the propagation of Separatism; but the leaders who formulated its doctrines and ideals were mainly educated Englishmen, graduates of Cambridge many of them, whose deliberate thinking carried them from Anglicanism to Nonconformity, and from Nonconformity to Separatism. Such was Robert Browne the founder, John Greenwood, Henry Barrowe, and John Penry; and such were the later leaders, William Brewster and John Robinson. These men, like the Puritans, were Calvinistic in doctrine; like the Puritans, they held that true Christians formed an ideal commonwealth, whose ruler Christ was, and whose law was the Bible; like the Puritans, they believed that the test of the true Christian was an inner spiritual condition bearing fruit in right living, rather than external conformity to established custom. But the Separatist was at once less aggressive and more radical than the Puritan Nonconformist. Desiring toleration for himself, he accorded it to others; submitting to persecution, he refused to practice it; and convinced that no purification of the Established Church could make it the true house of God, his cardinal doctrine was the separation of the spiritual and the temporal commonwealths. It was the merit of the Separatist to have caught that inspiring vision which was denied to most Protestant sects—the vision of the day when it belongeth not to the magistrate "to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties."

When the seventeenth century opened, exile for opinion's sake was no new thing for this despised and persecuted sect; and the little Separatist congregation of Scrooby which John Robin son led out of England in 1608 had doubtless read in Foxe's Book of Martyrs of the many early Protestants who had removed in the days of Mary to live unmolested at Basel or Geneva. They themselves could endure persecution with a steadfast heart. But they were unable to prevail against the "errors, heresies, and wonderful dissentions" which the devil had begun to sow even among the elect, and so crossed to Holland and settled in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam they were, indeed, free from persecution; but the conditions of life were unfamiliar there, and the dissensions more bitter even than in England. Therefore they moved on to Leyden, where they were joined by other English congregations, and where they remained, "knit together as a body in the most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord." Yet even there the world compassed them about and was not to be resisted. Of the grinding toil which made them old before their time they could not complain; but their children, associating with foreigners and disposed to marry with them, were losing their language and departing from their early instruction; while the renewal of the war with Spain threatened the liberty they enjoyed in their new home. To preserve the true faith intact, it was necessary to withdraw still more completely from the world; and they turned to America where they would be as isolated in fact as they were in idea. And so they "left that goodly and pleasant citie, which had been their resting place near 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, and looked not much upon these things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest countrie, and quieted their spirits."

Of many attempts to withdraw from the corruptions of a complex world of fact in order to dwell in spiritual peace according to the simple law of God or nature, few are more interesting than that which issued in the little colony of Plymouth. But in point of numbers, and in respect to the storm and stress of conflicting ideals which produce great events, Plymouth was soon eclipsed by Massachusetts Bay. The repressive measures of Elizabeth and James I bore less heavily on the Nonconformist than on the Separatist; but during the early years of Charles the activities of the former became the special object of royal displeasure. And from the point of view of the king the Nonconformist who wished to remain in the Church was, indeed, more dangerous than the Separatist who wished to get out of it. The great majority of the Puritans were still of the former type. Men like Cotton and Winthrop, less spiritual and more practical, less unworldly and more resistant, than men like Robinson and Bradford, were not prepared to renounce the land of their birth without a struggle. They wished rather to get control of the Government in order that their own ideas might prevail, and were more disposed to purify a corrupt society by act of Parliament than by passive renunciation and unobtrusive example.

And in the third decade of the century the Puritans were well on the way to the control of Church and Parliament. All over England they were sending to Westminster men of their own stubborn temper for whom political and religious liberty were but two sides of the same shield. They were buying up impropriated tithes and gaining control of appointments to livings. In hundreds of parishes the congregations remained outside while the official reader intoned the service from the Prayer Book, and then entered to hear their chosen minister preach doctrines that boded ill to the cause of royal authority. To the over-sanguine it might have seemed that episcopacy was beginning to break down into congregationalism, and congregationalism laying the foundation for control of Parliament, when Charles I, in March, 1629, pronounced the famous dissolution that marked the beginning of his personal rule. It was then that many Nonconformists, despairing of success at home, began to look to America as God's appointed refuge "from the generall callamitie"; and the ten years from 1630 to 1640, during which the king endeavored with the aid of Wentworth to dispense with Parliament, and with the aid of Laud to crush out Nonconformity, is precisely the period of the great Puritan migration to New England.

In the summer of that very year 1629 a group of Nonconformists, under the lead of John Winthrop, a gentleman of Suffolk whose estate was becoming inadequate to his customary manner of living, convinced themselves that they could best serve God by renouncing the struggle against king and bishop in order to set up in America a "due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical." And for such an enterprise it seemed that the way had been miraculously prepared. In March, 1628, John Endicott and five associates had obtained from the New England Council a grant of land extending from a point three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles, and westward from the Atlantic as far as the South Sea. The enterprise had in the mean time been joined by many Nonconformists, and in 1629 the associates obtained from the king a charter which confirmed their rights to the land, and in addition authorized them, under the title of "The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay," to establish and govern colonies within the limits of their jurisdiction. All the powers of the company were intrusted to a governor, deputy-governor, and board of eighteen assistants, with the final authority in the freemen assembled in general court. The officers were elected by the freemen of the company, and freemen were admitted to the company by the officers. The charter originally provided for the "election of the Governor and officers here in England"; but before it passed the seals the phrase was omitted: "With much difficulty," says Winthrop, "we got it rescinded." The change was of vital importance for those who were preparing to set up, as free as possible from all outside authority, a "due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical." Since the charter did not require the company's elections to be held in England, the freemen and officers had but to remove to America to transform a commercial corporation into a self-governing colony.

With this end in view, the offices of the company were transferred to those who signified their intention of removing. In March, 1630, all arrangements were completed, and over a thousand people, including the governor and officers of the company, left England. When they landed at Salem in June the prospect was so disheartening that some two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who went on to Boston Harbor two hundred died before December. The unfavorable reports of those who returned discouraged migration for many months; but for ten years after 1632 the repressive measures of Laud and Wentworth produced a veritable exodus, so that in 1643 the population of Massachusetts Bay is estimated to have been not less than sixteen thousand.

The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather. During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates, even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop said, to "keep sail with their equals." The latter, excluded by their Puritan and evangelical convictions from the profession for which they were trained, turned to America as the most inviting field for service among the elect of God. They were men of ability and conviction—"a chosen company of men, picked out ... by no human contrivance, but by a strange contrivance of God," to be the leaders of a chosen people.

Yet the Puritan colony was not made up of leaders. In firm intelligence, in clearly realized conceptions of Church and State, in moral fervor and spiritual exaltation, men like Winthrop and Davenport were far removed from the rank and file. The great majority of those who first came to Massachusetts were small "merchants, husbandmen, and artificers"; men with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would have come for religion's sake alone. Persecution was the efficient cause, but straitened circumstances frequently gave point to the pricks of conscience. Even Winthrop himself, a man of substantial possessions, tells us that a consideration for his undertaking the New World venture was that "his meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to continue in that place and employment where he now is." How far more persuasive an appeal was this to common folk! "This lande grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a horse or sheep. All towns complain of the burthen of their poore though we have taken up many unnecessary, yea unlawfull trades to maintaine them. Children, servants, and neighbors (especially if they be poore) are considered the greatest burthen. We stand heer striving for places of habitation (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement."

Both in a spiritual and a material sense, it was to preserve and not to dissolve the ties of community life that the Puritans, leaders and followers alike, came to Massachusetts. Coming as townsmen seeking land, they settled in towns, to which they often gave the names of the places from which they came—for example, Boston, Plymouth, Dorchester. The town was not originally an industrial center, but a group of agricultural proprietors who procured from the company title to the land which they held individually or in common according to custom, and which they cultivated after the manner with which they were familiar. Free and equal access to the soil was the principle upon which the original grants were made: there were no quit-rents or charges; the allotments were small, and so far as possible equal in value. And happily the ideals of the settlers were suited to the environment in which they found themselves. The soil was adapted to the raising of a variety of farm products; corn and fodder and vegetables, swine and cattle and horses; products requiring neither great estates nor servile labor for profitable cultivation. Thus in New England the unit of settlement was a group of small, free proprietors living together in villages and managing their affairs by concerted action. The town and the town meeting were as natural to New England as the plantation and the county were to Virginia and the other Southern colonies.

But the community in New England was a spiritual as well as an industrial enterprise, and the counterpart of the town was the church. By the leaders especially, settlement was regarded more as a planting of churches than as the founding of towns. In their view the church covenant was the expression of the fundamental social pact, the public confession of membership in the spiritual City of God, the very basis of "that Church-State," that "due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical," which they had come to the New World to establish.

"We covenant with our Lord and with one another"—so runs the Salem covenant, which may be taken as typical—"we avouch the Lord to be our God, and ourselves to be his people, in the truth and simplicity of our spirits. We promise to walk with our brethren, with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding jealousy and suspicion, back-bitings, censurings, provokings, secret risings of spirit against them; but in all offenses to follow the rule of our Lord Jesus, and to bear and forbear, give and forgive, as he hath taught us. We do hereby promise to carry ourselves in all lawful obedience to those that are over us, in church and commonwealth. We resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular callings; shunning idleness as the bane of any state; nor will we deal hardly or oppressingly with any, wherein we are the Lord's stewards."

Town and church were thus the basis of settlement; but whatever measure of self-direction either might enjoy, neither was regarded as independent. All legal authority was vested in the company and exercised by the officers and freemen assembled in general court. Yet of the two thousand settlers who came over in 1630, less than a score were members of the company. Authority so narrowly confined could not long remain unquestioned in a primitive community. In October, 1630, one hundred and nine persons petitioned to be admitted to the freedom of the corporation. It was a critical moment in the history of this "due form of Government." Without numbers, the colony could not thrive; without restriction of authority, it would be in danger of falling away from the ideals of its founders. The circumstance was one of many to reveal the essential difference, in respect to primary motive, between leaders and followers. The mass of the settlers had migrated primarily to secure economic enfranchisement: too great restraint would drive them to the north, where colonists were desired by Mason and Gorges, or to Plymouth, where the tolerant Pilgrims would welcome them perhaps on easier terms. But Winthrop and his associates had migrated primarily to establish a community that should live by God's law; and to admit all freeholders to share in its direction would end in the defeat of that high purpose.

Weight of numbers prevailed at last; and the history of Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century is the story of the vain and pathetic effort of single-minded men to identify the temporal and the spiritual commonwealths. The compromise presently made was the first step in the final surrender. The one hundred and nine petitioners were admitted; but it was shortly voted, in plain violation of the charter, that the rights of the freemen should be confined to the election of the assistants; and, "to the end that the body of the commons may be preserved of honest and good men, it was likewise ordered that for time to come no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body polliticke but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of the same." In order to preserve the purity of the state still more effectively, it was voted, in 1636, that even church members should be excluded unless the churches to which they belonged had secured the approbation both of the magistrates and of a majority of the churches already established.

The suffrage remained thus restricted until 1684, although a nominal modification was made in 1664. But the freemen were not long content to see their privileges confined to the election of assistants and magistrates. The first protest was characteristically English. In 1632 the minister of Watertown Church, George Phillips, more independent in his manner of thinking than the majority of the clergy, induced his congregation to pass the first resolution in America against taxation without representation: "It was not safe," they contended, "to pay money after that sort for fear of bringing their posterity into bondage." A magisterial reprimand from Governor Winthrop reduced the protestants to the level of an apology; but in 1634 the freemen demanded to see the charter, and when it became generally known that supreme authority was vested in the freemen assembled in general court, rather than in the board of assistants, the latter was forced to concede to the former a share in the business of lawmaking. Since it was inconvenient for all the freemen to attend the sessions of the general court in person, they adopted the custom of sending two deputies from each town to represent them. The assistants, thus overbalanced by the deputies, demanded the privilege of the negative voice, a contention which the deputies were inclined to deny, but which resulted, in 1644, in the separation of the general court into two houses, the board of assistants constituting the upper chamber and the deputies the lower. During the same period the discretionary powers of the magistrates in administering the laws gave the deputies much concern; and their constant protests were not without effect, although the victory was mainly to the magistrates. The results of the first decade of conflict between leaders and followers over the distribution of political power are registered in the famous Body of Liberties which was promulgated in 1641.

In spite of concessions to the freemen, political privilege remained narrowly limited. Between 1631 and 1674 the total number of freemen admitted was 2527, about one fifth of the adult male residents. The suffrage was thus far more exclusive than a freehold test would have made it. In town meeting, voting was not always restricted to freemen; but in deciding important matters non-freemen were usually excluded. And yet the formal restriction of political privilege, narrow as it was, gives no true measure of the real concentration of political power. Deference to the magistrate, no less than the habit of protest against illegal action, was an English tradition. The circumstances of the migration had tremendously accentuated the force of the religious appeal, and the freemen, being church members, were of all the settlers precisely that part most disposed to defer to the wishes of the clergy, and to select for magistrates those whom they approved.

"They daily direct their choice to make use of such men as mainly endeavor to keepe the truths of Christ unspotted, neither will any christian of sound judgment vote for any but such as earnestly contend for the faith, although the increase of trade and traffique may be a great inducement to some."

The freemen sometimes demonstrated their power, but the same men were customarily returned to office year after year. The magistrates and the clergy, a handful of men with practically permanent tenure, men of strong character and of great ability for the most part, virtually governed Massachusetts Bay for two generations.

They governed the colony, these "unmitred popes of a pope-hating commonwealth," yet not without storm and stress; and of all their difficulties, the quarrel with the freemen over the distribution of political power was far from being the most perplexing. In 1681, Roger Williams, a young minister of engaging personality, with "many precious parts, but very unsettled in judgemente," came to Boston. He scrupled to "officiate to an unseparated people," and soon went down to Plymouth, where he "begane to fall into strange oppinions, and from opinion to practise; which caused some controversie, by occasion whereof he left them something abruptly." Returning to Massachusetts, he became minister of Salem Church, which was itself thought to be tinged with radicalism. But the radicalism of Williams went beyond all reason. He maintained that the land of New England belonged to the Indians, and that the settlers were therefore living "under a sin of usurpation of others possessions." And he denied that the state had any rightful authority in matters of conscience, holding with Robert Browne that "concerning the outward provision and outward justice [the magistrates] are to look to it; but to compell religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to Ecclesiasticall Government by lawes and penalties, belongeth not to them." By farmer and magistrate alike the man was regarded as a nuisance, and after three troubled years was banished from the colony.

The ideas of Williams were too relevant not to arouse controversy, but too remote from the spirit of the age to win many adherents. Of another sort was Mistress Anne Hutchinson, a woman of "nimble wit and active spirit," one of those popular village characters who go about among the poor and sick, bringing wholesome draughts of cordial, gossip, and consolation. As a taster of dry sermons there was none better; so that many women of Boston, and not a few men, fell into the habit of assembling at her house, where she discoursed on the latest sermon or Thursday lecture, and by exegesis and comment and criticism made all clear. And her doctrine went straight to the heart and intelligence of the average man in the seventeenth century, as it does to-day and has in all ages. "Come along with me says one of them. I'le bring you to a woman that preaches better Gospell than any of your black-coats that have been at the Niniversity, a woman of another kind of spirit, who hath had many revelations of things to come; and for my part, saith he, I had rather hear such a one that speaks from the mere motion of the spirit, without any study at all, than any of your learned Scollers, although they may be fuller of Scripture." This, indeed, was the secret of Mistress Anne's power, that she spoke the language of the untutored, and infused into the scholastic categories of theology the elemental and familiar emotions of daily life.