wholly in domestic service; there were not enough of them to affect the industrial life of New England or to be worth mentioning as a class.  Neither were there many of the wretched people, kidnapped from the jails and slums of English sea-ports, such as in those early days when negro labour was scarce, were sent by ship-loads to Virginia, to become the progenitors of the “white trash.”  There were a few indented white servants, usually of the class known as “redemptioners,” or immigrants who voluntarily bound themselves to service for a stated time in order to defray the cost of their voyage from Europe.  At a later time there were many of these “redemptioners” in the middle colonies, but in New England they were very few; and as no stigma of servitude was attached to manual labour, they were apt at the end of their terms of service to become independent farmers; thus they ceased to be recognizable as a distinct class of society.  Nevertheless the common statement that no traces of the “mean white” are to be found in New England is perhaps somewhat too sweeping.  Interspersed among those respectable and tidy mountain villages, once full of such vigorous life, one sometimes comes upon little isolated groups of wretched hovels whose local reputation is sufficiently indicated by such terse epithets as “Hardscrabble” or “Hell-huddle.”  Their denizens may in many instances be the degenerate offspring of a sound New England stock, but they sometimes show strong points of resemblance to that “white trash” which has come to be a recognizable strain of the English race; and one cannot help suspecting that while the New England colonies made every effort to keep out such riff raff, it may nevertheless have now and then crept in.  However this may be, it cannot be said that this element ever formed a noticeable feature in the life of colonial New England.  As regards their social derivation, the settlers of New England were homogeneous in character to a remarkable degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of the English stock.  In all history there has been no other instance of colonization so exclusively effected by picked and chosen men.  The colonists knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be.  It was the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his election sermon of 1688:  “God sifted a whole nation, that He might send choice grain into the wilderness.” [Sidenote:  Respectable character of the emigration]

This matter comes to have more than a local interest, when we reflect that the 26,000 New Englanders of 1640 have in two hundred and fifty years increased to something like 15,000,000.  From these men have come at least one-fourth of the present population of the United States.  Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the fact of the original migration when duly considered.  In these times, when great steamers sail every day from European ports, bringing immigrants to a country not