er standard of comfort and culture; while the sons of the old
farmers go off to the universities to prepare for a professional career,
and the daughters marry merchants or lawyers in the cities. The
mountain-streams of New England, too, afford so much water-power as to
bring in ugly factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to
introduce into the community a class of people very different from the
landholding descendants of the Puritans. When once a factory is
established near a village, one no longer feels free to sleep with
doors unbolted.

It will be long, however, I trust, before the simple, earnest and
independent type of character that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills
of Massachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire shall cease to
operate like a powerful leaven upon the whole of American society. Much
has been said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry, which, after
all, as a great historian reminds us, "implies the arbitrary choice of
one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to
become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are
forgotten." [1] Quite enough has been said, too, in discredit of
Puritanism,--its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its quaint
affectations of Hebraism. Yet these things were but the symptoms of the
intensity of its reverence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which
Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the Bible and Christianity.
No loftier ideal has ever been conceived than that of the Puritan who
would fain have made of the world a City of God. If we could sum up all
that England owes to Puritanism, the story would be a great one indeed.
As regards the United States, we may safely say that what is noblest in
our history to-day, and of happiest augury for our social and political
future, is the impress left upon the character of our people by the
heroic men who came to New England early in the seventeenth century.

The settlement of New England by the Puritans occupies a peculiar
position in the annals of colonization, and without understanding this
we cannot properly appreciate the character of the purely democratic
society which I have sought to describe. As a general rule colonies have
been founded, either by governments or by private enterprise, for
political or commercial reasons. The aim has been--on the part of
governments--to annoy some rival power, or to get rid of criminals, or
to open some new aven