r small shopkeeper, deferring to the freeholder
and the freeman, but aware that fortune had placed him above the artisan
and day laborer; the artisan and the day laborer, proud that none could
call them "servant":--these were the simple folk who in all the colonies
made the great majority of free citizens. Chiefly occupied with earning
daily bread by the labor of their hands, many were content to escape the
debtor's prison, the best well satisfied with a modest competence. They
heard of countries beyond sea, but their outlook was bounded by the
parish. The provincialism of their minds was not dispelled by communion
with the classics of all ages, and no cheap magazine or popular novel
came to dull the edge of native shrewdness or curiosity. They read not
at all, or they read the Bible, the _Paradise Lost_ or the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, or some chance book of sermons or of theology, or book of
English ballads. Periwigs and gold braid were not for them, nor was it
any part of their ambition to enter the charmed circle of polite
society, to associate on terms of equality with the "best people" in the
colony.

Yet with whatever semblance the older settlements might take on the
character of European civilization, America was bound to be the land of
opportunity so long as there was abundance of free land to entice the
ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land
became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began
to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men,
accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward
along the rivers into Maine and New Hampshire, or beyond the original
Connecticut settlements into the valley of the Housatonic. Here land was
less often than formerly disposed of to groups of proprietors intent to
maintain the traditions of town and church; acquired by the older towns
or by land agents, it was more often sold to companies or to individuals
for the profit it would bring. The famous New Hampshire grants, one
hundred and thirty townships in the present State of Vermont, fell
mainly to speculators who sold to the highest bidder, covenanted and
uncovenanted alike, among the throng of home-seekers who pushed into
this western country in the seventh decade of the century. Long before
the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of
pioneer settlements--such as Vassalboro and Durham on the Androscoggin
and th