cy, but would have had Church and State united under
Presbyterianism. They were intolerant, as against Roger Williams and the
"witches," and at first perpetrated cruelties like those from which they
themselves had fled. But something in the free air of the big continent
developed the spirit of liberty among them until they, too, like the
Pilgrims, became Independents and Separatists,--and so,
Congregationalists rather than Presbyterians.

The first thing we note among these New Englanders was their
town-meetings, derived from the ancient folk-mote, in which they elected
their magistrates, and imposed upon themselves the necessary taxes for
schools, highways, and officers of the law. They formed self-governed
communities, who selected for rulers their ablest and fittest men,
marked for their integrity and intelligence,--grave, austere, unselfish,
and incorruptible. Money was of little account in comparison with
character. The earliest settlers were the picked and chosen men of the
yeomanry of England, and generally thrifty and prosperous. Their leaders
had had high social positions in their English homes, and their
ministers were chiefly graduates of the universities, some of whom were
fine scholars in both Hebrew and Greek, had been settled in important
parishes, and would have attained high ecclesiastical rank had they not
been nonconformists,--opposed to the ritual, rather than the theological
tenets of the English Church as established by Elizabeth. Of course they
were Calvinists, more rigid even than their brethren in Geneva. The
Bible was to them the ultimate standard of authority--civil and
religious. The only restriction on suffrage was its being conditioned on
church-membership. They aspired, probably from Calvinistic influence,
but aspired in vain, to establish a theocracy, borrowed somewhat from
that of the Jews. I do not agree with Mr. John Fiske, in his able and
interesting history of the "Beginnings of New England," that "the
Puritan appealed to reason;" I think that the Bible was their ultimate
authority in all matters pertaining to religion. As to civil government,
the reason may have had a great place in their institutions; but these
grew up from their surroundings rather than from study or the experience
of the past. There was more originality in them than it is customary to
suppose. They were the development of Old England life in New England,
but grew in many respects away from the parent stock.

The