t in the world.

CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.

The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was
purely and exclusively English. There was nothing in it that came from
the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very
little that was Welsh. As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that
had been planted in New England by 1640 "thenceforward continued to
multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable
seclusion from other communities." During the whole of this period New
England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the
Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward
march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet
another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a
homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast.
Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting
of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a
slight infusion of non-English blood. In 1652, after his victories at
Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to
Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell. After the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots
came to Massachusetts. And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families
came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New
Hampshire, and elsewhere. In view of these facts it may be said that
there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely
English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth
century. From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest
authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New
England people at that time could trace their origin to England in
the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales. As already observed, every
English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was
a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties.
[Sidenote: The exodus was purely English]

The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social
condition as it was in blood. The emigration was preeminent for its
respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it
consisted largely of country squires and yeomen. The men who followed
Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which t