East Hampton has always been a place of good morals.  One of the earliest Puritan regulations of this place was that licensed liquor-sellers should not sell to the young, and that half a pint only should be given to four men—­an amount so small that most drinkers would consider it only a tantalization.  A woman here, in those days, was sentenced “to pay a fine of fifteen dollars, or to stand one hour with a cleft stick upon her tongue, for saying that her husband had brought her to a place where there was neither gospel nor magistracy.”  She deserved punishment of some kind, but they ought to have let her off with a fine, for no woman’s tongue ought to be interfered with.  When in olden time a Yankee peddler with the measles went to church here on the Sabbath for the purpose of selling his knick-knacks, his behavior was considered so perfidious that before the peddler left town the next morning the young men gave him a free ride upon what seems to us an uncomfortable and insufficient vehicle, namely, a rail, and then dropped him into the duck-pond.  But such conduct was not sanctioned by the better people of the place.  Nothing could be more unwholesome for a man with the measles than a plunge in a duck-pond, and so the peddler recovered one thousand dollars damage.  So you see that every form of misdemeanor was sternly put down.  Think of the high state of morals and religion which induced this people, at an early day, at a political town-meeting, to adopt this decree:  “We do sociate and conjoin ourselves and successors to be one town or corporation, and do for ourselves and our successors, and such as shall be adjoined to us at any time hereafter, enter into combination and confederation together to maintain and preserve the purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ which we now possess.”

The pledge of that day has been fully kept; and for sobriety, industry, abhorrence of evil and adherence to an unmixed gospel, we know not the equal of this place.

That document of two centuries ago reads strangely behind the times, but it will be some hundreds of years yet before other communities come up to the point where that document stops.  All our laws and institutions are yet to be Christianized.  The Puritans took possession of this land in the name of Christ, and it belongs to Him; and if people do not like that religion, let them go somewhere else.  They can find many lands where there is no Christian religion to bother them.  Let them emigrate to Greenland, and we will provide them with mittens, or to the South Sea Islands, and we will send them ice-coolers.  This land is for Christ.  Our Legislatures and Congresses shall yet pass laws as radically evangelical as the venerable document above referred to.  East Hampton, instead of being two hundred years behind, is two hundred years ahead.

Glorious place to summer!  Darwin and Stuart, Mill and Huxley and Renan have not been through here yet.  May they miss the train the day they start for this place!  With an Atlantic Ocean in which to wash, and a great-hearted, practical, sympathetic gospel to take care of all the future, who could not be happy in East Hampton?