The rank and file were mostly intelligent
and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks of society were not represented
in the emigration; and all idle, shiftless, or disorderly people were
rigorously refused admission into the new communities, the early history
of which was therefore singularly free from anything like riot or
mutiny. To an extent unparalleled, therefore, in the annals of
colonization, the settlers of New England were a body of _picked men_.
Their Puritanism was the natural outcome of their free-thinking,
combined with an earnestness of character which could constrain them to
any sacrifices needful for realizing their high ideal of life. They gave
up pleasant homes in England, and they left them with no feeling of
rancour towards their native land, in order that, by dint of whatever
hardship, they might establish in the American wilderness what should
approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing community. It matters
little that their conceptions were in some respects narrow. In the
unflinching adherence to duty which prompted their enterprise, and in
the sober intelligence with which it was carried out, we have, as I said
before, the key to what is best in the history of the American people.
Out of such a colonization as that here described nothing but a
democratic society could very well come, save perhaps in case of a
scarcity of arable land.
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