and but slight experience with the larger world. Some were
middle-class lawyers, merchants, and squires; a few, but very few, were
of higher rank, while scores were of the soil, coarse in language and
habits, and given to practices characteristic of the peasantry of
England at that time. The fact that hardly a fifth of those in
Massachusetts were professed Christians renders it doubtful how far
religious convictions were the only driving motive that sent hundreds of
these men to New England. The leaders were, in a majority of cases,
university men familiar with good literature and possessed of good
libraries, but more cognizant of theology and philosophy than of the law
and order of nature. Some were professional soldiers, simple in thought
as they were courageous in action, while others were men of affairs, who
had acquired experience before the courts and in the counting houses of
England and were often amazingly versatile, able to turn their hands to
any business that confronted them. For the great majority there was
little opportunity in these early years to practice a trade or a
profession. Except for the clergy, who could preach in America with
greater freedom than in England, and for the occasional practitioner in
physic or the law who as time went on found occasion to apply his
knowledge in the household and the courts, there was little else for any
one to do than engage in farming, fishing, and trading with the Indians,
or turn carpenter and cobbler according to demand. The artisan became a
farmer, though still preserving his knack as a craftsman, and expended
his skill and his muscle in subduing a tough and unbroken soil.

New England was probably overstocked with men of strong minds and
assertive dispositions. It was settled by radicals who would never have
left the mother country had they not possessed well-formed opinions
regarding some of the most important aspects of religious and social
life. We may call them all Puritans, but as to the details of their
Puritanism they often differed as widely as did Roundheads and Cavaliers
in England. Though representative of a common movement, they were far
from united in their beliefs or consistent in their political practices.
There was always something of the inquisitor at Boston and of the monk
at Plymouth, and in all the Puritan colonies there prevailed a
self-satisfied sense of importance as the chosen of God. The
controversies that arose over jurisdictions and