ging about a
thousand passengers.

It is desirable to understand how this population, destined to be the
germ of a state, was constituted. Of members of the Massachusetts
Company, it cannot be ascertained that so many as twenty had come over.
That company, as has been explained, was one formed mainly for the
furtherance, not of any private interests, but of a great public object.
As a corporation, it had obtained the ownership of a large American
territory, on which it designed to place a colony which should be a
refuge for civil and religious freedom. By combined counsels, it had
arranged the method of ordering a settlement, and the liberality of its
members had provided the means of transporting those who should compose
it. This done, the greater portion were content to remain and await the
course of events at home, while a few of their number embarked to attend
to the providing of the asylum which very soon might be needed by them
all.

It may be safely concluded that most of the persons who accompanied the
emigrant members of the company to New England sympathized with them in
their object. It may be inferred from the common expenditures which were
soon incurred, that considerable sums of money were brought over. And
almost all the settlers may be presumed to have belonged to one or
another of the four following classes: (1) Those who paid for their
passage and who were accordingly entitled on their arrival to a grant of
as much land as if they had subscribed fifty pounds to the "common
stock" of the company; (2) those who, for their exercise of some
profession, art, or trade, were to receive specified remuneration from
the company in money or land; (3) those who paid a portion of their
expenses, and after making up the rest by labor at the rate of three
shillings a day, were to receive fifty acres of land; (4) indented
servants, for whose conveyance their masters were to be remunerated at
the rate of fifty acres of land for each. All Englishmen were eligible
to the franchise of the Massachusetts Company; but until elected by a
vote of the existing freemen no one had any share in the government of
the plantation or in the selection of its governors.

The reception of the new-comers was discouraging. More than a quarter
part of their predecessors at Salem had died during the previous winter,
and many of the survivors were ill or feeble. The faithful Higginson was
wasting with a hectic fever, which soon proved fata