American Political Ideas Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History | Page 7

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 avenue of trade, or--on the part of the people--to
escape from straitened circumstances at home, or to find a refuge from
religious persecution. In the settlement of New England none of these
motives were operative except the last, and that only to a slight extent.
The Puritans who fled from Nottinghamshire to Holland in 1608, and
twelve years afterwards crossed the ocean in the Mayflower, may be
said to have been driven from England by persecution. But this was not
the case with the Puritans who between 1630 and 1650 went from
Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and from Dorset and Devonshire,
and founded the colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut. These men
left their homes at a time when Puritanism was waxing powerful and
could not be assailed with impunity. They belonged to the upper and
middle classes of the society of that day, outside of the peerage. Mr.
Freeman has pointed out the importance of the change by which, after
the Norman Conquest, the Old-English nobility or thegnhood was
pushed down into "a secondary place in the political and social scale."
Of the far-reaching effects of this change upon the whole subsequent
history of the English race I shall hereafter have occasion to speak. The
proximate effect was that "the ancient lords of the soil, thus thrust
down into the second rank, formed that great body of freeholders, the
stout gentry and yeomanry of England, who were for so many ages the
strength of the land." [2] It was from this ancient thegnhood that the
Puritan settlers of New England were mainly descended. It is no
unusual thing for a Massachusetts family to trace its pedigree to a lord
of the manor in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The leaders of the
New England emigration were country gentlemen of good fortune,
similar in position to such men as Hampden and Cromwell; a large
proportion of them had taken degrees at Cambridge. The rank and file
were mostly intelligent and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks of
society were not represented in the emigration; and all idle, shiftless, or
disorderly people were rigorously refused admission into the new
communities, the early history of which was therefore singularly free

from anything like riot or mutiny. To an extent unparalleled, therefore,
in the annals of colonization, the settlers of New England were a body
of picked men. Their Puritanism was the natural outcome of their
free-thinking, combined with an earnestness of character which could
constrain them to any sacrifices needful for realizing their high ideal of
life. They gave up pleasant homes in England, and they left them with
no feeling of rancour towards their native land, in order that, by dint of
whatever hardship, they might establish in the American wilderness
what should approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing
community. It matters little that their conceptions were in some
respects narrow. In the unflinching adherence to duty which prompted
their enterprise, and in the sober intelligence with which it was carried
out, we have, as I said before, the key to what is best in the history of
the American people.
Out of such a colonization as that here described nothing but a
democratic society could very well come, save perhaps in case of a
scarcity of arable land. Between the country gentleman and the yeoman
who has become a landed proprietor, the difference is not great enough
to allow the establishment of permanent distinctions, social or political.
Immediately on their arrival in New England, the settlers proceeded to
form for themselves a government as purely democratic as any that has
ever been seen in the world. Instead of scattering about over the
country, the requirements of education and of public worship, as well
as of defence against Indian attacks, obliged them to form small village
communities. As these villages multiplied, the surface of the country
came to be laid out in small districts (usually from six to ten miles in
length and breadth) called townships. Each township contained its
village together with the woodlands surrounding it. In later days two or
more villages have often grown up within the limits of the same
township, and the road from one village to another is sometimes
bordered with homesteads and cultivated fields throughout nearly its
whole length. In the neighbourhood of Boston villages and small towns
crowd closely together for twenty miles in every direction; and all these
will no doubt by and by grow together into a vast and complicated city,
in somewhat the same way that London has grown.

From the outset the government of the township