ties. The founders of Plymouth had been impelled by
the peculiarities of their situation to examine the subject with
deeper and more comprehensive research. After twelve years of
banishment from the land of their first allegiance, during which
they had been under an adoptive and temporary subjection to another
sovereign, they must naturally have been led to reflect upon the
relative rights and duties of allegiance and subjection. They had
resided in a city, the seat of a university, where the polemical and
political controversies of the time were pursued with uncommon
fervor. In this period they had witnessed the deadly struggle
between the two parties, into which the people of the United
Provinces, after their separation from the crown of Spain, had
divided themselves. The contest embraced within its compass not only
theological doctrines, but political principles, and Maurice and
Barnevelt were the temporal leaders of the same rival factions, of
which Episcopius and Polyander were the ecclesiastical champions.

That the investigation of the fundamental principles of government
was deeply implicated in these dissensions is evident from the
immortal work of Grotius, upon the rights of war and peace, which
undoubtedly originated from them. Grotius himself had been a most
distinguished actor and sufferer in those important scenes of
internal convulsion, and his work was first published very shortly
after the departure of our forefathers from Leyden. It is well
known that in the course of the contest Mr. Robinson more than once
appeared, with credit to himself, as a public disputant against
Episcopius; and from the manner in which the fact is related by
Governor Bradford, it is apparent that the whole English Church at
Leyden took a zealous interest in the religious part of the
controversy. As strangers in the land, it is presumable that they
wisely and honorably avoided entangling themselves in the political
contentions involved with it. Yet the theoretic principles, as they
were drawn into discussion, could not fail to arrest their
attention, and must have assisted them to form accurate ideas
concerning the origin and extent of authority among men, independent
of positive institutions. The importance of these circumstances
will not be duly weighed without taking into consideration the state
of opinion then prevalent in England. The general principles of
government were there little understood and less examine