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

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 was vested in the TOWN-MEETING,--an institution which in its present form is said to be peculiar to New England, but which, as we shall see, has close analogies with local self-governing bodies in other ages and countries. Once in each year--usually in the month of March--a meeting is held,