The Puritan exodus from England, chiefly from the eastern counties, first to Holland, and then to New England, was at its height during the persecutions of Archbishop Laud in the reign of Charles I. The Pilgrims—­as the small company of Separatists were called who followed their Puritanism to the extent of breaking entirely away from the Church, and who left Holland for America—­came to barren shores, after having learned many things from the Dutch.  Their pilgrimage was taken, not with the view of improving their fortunes, like the more aristocratic settlers of Virginia, but to develop their peculiar ideas.  It must be borne in mind that the civilization they brought with them was a growth from Teutonic ancestry,—­an evolution from Saxon times, although it is difficult to trace the successive developments during the Norman rule.  The Pilgrims brought with them to America an intense love of liberty, and consequently an equally intense hatred of arbitrary taxation.  Their enjoyment of religious rights was surpassed only by their aversion to Episcopacy.  They were a plain and simple people, who abhorred the vices of the patrician class at home; but they loved learning, and sought to extend knowledge, as the bulwark of free institutions.  The Puritans who followed them within ten years and settled Massachusetts Bay and Salem, were direct from England.  They were not Separatists, like the Pilgrims, but Presbyterians; they hated Episcopacy, 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