very elevated and accomplished
characters, they can not, taken at the highest, be considered so
respectable a class as their somewhat despised northern brethren; and
the lower ranks are decidedly in a state of comparative moral
debasement."--Murray, vol. ii., p. 394.]

[Footnote 320: Descendants of the Puritans.]

[Footnote 321: "The word Yankees (which is the Indian corruption of
English _Yengeese_) is both offensive and incorrect as applied to any
but New Englanders."--Godley's _Letters from America_.]

[Footnote 322: "James I. ranked among their party, as much as he was
able by severe usage, all those who stood up in defense even of civil
liberty."--Bolingbroke's _Remarks upon English History_, p. 283.]

[Footnote 323: "In memory of the hospitalities which the company had
received at the last English port from which they had sailed, this
oldest New England colony obtained the name of Plymouth. The two vessels
which conveyed the Pilgrim fathers from Delft Haven were the _Mayflower_
and the _Speedwell_. The Mayflower alone proceeded to America."--Bancroft,
vol. i., p. 313.]

[Footnote 324: "Under the influence of this wild notion, the colonists
of New Plymouth, in imitation of the primitive Christians, threw all
their property into a common stock."--Robertson's _America_, book x. One
of the many errors with which the volume of Robertson teems. There was
no attempt at imitating the primitive Christians; the partnership was a
consequence of negotiation with British merchants; the colonists
preferred the system of private property, and acted upon it, as far and
as soon as was possible.--Bancroft's _History of the United States_,
vol. i., p. 306.]

[Footnote 325: "The remonstrances of the Virginia corporation and a
transient regard for the rights of the country could delay, but could
not defeat, a measure that was sustained by the personal favorites of
the monarch. King James issued to forty of his subjects, some of them
members of his household and his government, the most wealthy and
powerful of the English nobility, a patent, which in American annals,
and even in the history of the world, has but one parallel. The
territory conferred on the patentees in absolute property, with
unlimited jurisdiction, the sole powers of legislation, the appointment
of all officers and all forms of government, comprised, and at the time
was believed to comprise, much more than a million of square miles: it
was, by a single signatur