ociety, while New
England represented a digression from English society. There were then,
as now, "stand-patters" and "progressives." It was the second class who,
while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed
a fearless intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the
history of the United States. But to the student of early American
literature all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing
with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He
has learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile
classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there
were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the
Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans of Boston,
and that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these
general statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must
always go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual
person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative
evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each
thinking person becomes a species by himself.

While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial
instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly
English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of
a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how
the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and
moral, as well as their political problems. Among the emigrants from
England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status,
religious opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed
the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage,
the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go
out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet triumphantly
a searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few
picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile while a few saints
may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were
made up of brave men and braver women.

It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single,
dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies. Mrs.
Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was
measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about whom she was w