sorship over the
press, and private opinions in the case of Mr. Pinchion, and their
tyranny over the organization of new Churches and the ordinations of
ministers--fining both Church and ministers for exercising what is
universally acknowledged to be essential to _independent_ worship--are
but further illustrations of the same spirit of intolerance. It was the
intolerance of the Massachusetts Bay Government that caused the
settlement of Connecticut, of New Haven, as well as of Rhode Island. The
noble minds of the younger Winthrop, of Eaton, no more than that of
Roger Williams, could shrivel themselves into the nutshell littleness of
the Massachusetts Bay Government--so called, indeed, by courtesy, or by
way of accommodation, rather than as conveying a proper idea of a
Government, as it consisted solely of Congregationalists, who alone were
eligible to office and eligible as electors to office, and was therefore
more properly a Congregational Association than a civil government; yet
this association assumed the combined powers of legislation,
administration of government and law, and of the army--absolute
censorship of the press, of worship, of even private opinions--and
punished as criminals those who even expressed their griefs in
petitions; and when punished they had the additional aggravation of
being told that they were not punished for petitioning, but for what the
petitions contained, as if they could petition without using words, and
as if they could express their griefs and wishes without using words for
that purpose. Yet under such pretexts was a despotism established and
maintained for sixty years without a parallel in the annals of colonial
history, ancient or modern; under which five-sixths of the population
had no more freedom of worship, of opinion, or of franchise, than the
slaves of the Southern States before the recent civil war. It is not
surprising that a Government based on no British principle, based on the
above principle of a one Church membership, every franchise under which
was granted, or cancelled, or continued at the pleasure of Elders and
their Courts--such a Government, un-British in its foundation and
elements, could not be expected to be loyal to the Royal branch of the
constitution.

It is not surprising that even among the Puritan party themselves, who
were now warring against the King, and who were soon to bring him to the
block, such unmitigated despotism and persecutions in Massachus