It will be long, however, I trust, before the simple, earnest and independent type of character that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills of Massachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire shall cease to operate like a powerful leaven upon the whole of American society.  Much has been said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry, which, after all, as a great historian reminds us, “implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virtues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of right and wrong are forgotten.” [1] Quite enough has been said, too, in discredit of Puritanism,—­its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its quaint affectations of Hebraism.  Yet these things were but the symptoms of the intensity of its reverence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the Bible and Christianity.  No loftier ideal has ever been conceived than that of the Puritan who would fain have made of the world a City of God.  If we could sum up all that England owes to Puritanism, the story would be a great one indeed.  As regards the United States, we may safely say that what is noblest in our history to-day, and of happiest augury for our social and political future, is the impress left upon the character of our people by the heroic men who came to New England early in the seventeenth century.

The settlement of New England by the Puritans occupies a peculiar position in the annals of colonization, and without understanding this we cannot properly appreciate the character of the purely democratic society which I have sought to describe.  As a general rule colonies have been founded, 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