id
the toils and successes of an enormous commerce, we trace the
foundations, overgrown perhaps, but all unshaken, of that stern edifice
of civil and religious liberty[322] which the Pilgrim fathers raised
with their untiring labor, and cemented with their blood.

The peculiar nature of the first New England emigration was the result
of those strong tendencies of the British people soon afterward
strengthened into a determination sufficiently powerful to sacrifice
the monarch and subvert the Church and State.

The Brownists, or, as they are more happily called, the Pilgrim fathers,
set sail on the 12th of July, 1620, in two small vessels. There were in
all 120 souls, with a moderate supply of provisions and goods. On the
9th of November they reached Cape Cod, after a rough voyage; they had
been obliged to send one of their ships back to England. From ignorance
of the coast and from the lateness of the season, they could not find
any very advantageous place of settlement; they finally fixed upon New
Plymouth,[323] where they landed on the 21st of December. During the
remainder of the winter they suffered terribly from cold, want, and
sickness; no more than fifty remained alive when spring came to mitigate
their sufferings. The after progress of the little colony was for some
time slow and painful. The system of common property[324] had excited
grievous discontent; this tended to create an aversion to labor that was
to be productive of no more benefit to the industrious than to the idle;
in a short time it became necessary to enforce a certain degree of
exertion by the punishment of whipping. They intrusted all religious
matters to the gifted among their brethren, and would not allow of the
formation of any regular ministry. However, the unsuitableness of these
systems to men subject to the usual impulses and weakness of human
nature soon became obvious, and the first errors were gradually
corrected. In the course of ten years the population reached to 300, and
the settlement prospered considerably.

King James was not satisfied with the slow progress of American
colonization. (1620.) In the same year that the Pilgrim fathers landed
at Plymouth, he formed a new company under the title of the Grand
Council of Plymouth,[325] and appointed many people of rank and
influence to its direction. Little good, however, resulted from this
step. Though the council itself was incapable of the generous project of
planting colonies,