" What the early
settlers of Massachusetts _did_ intend, and what they accomplished, was
the founding here of a _new_ England, and a better one, where the
political superstitions and abuses of the old should never have leave to
take root. So much, we may say, they deliberately intended. No nobles,
either lay or cleric, no great landed estates, and no universal ignorance
as the seed-plot of vice and unreason; but an elective magistracy and
clergy, land for all who would till it, and reading and writing, will ye
nill ye, instead. Here at last, it would seem, simple manhood is to have
a chance to play his stake against Fortune with honest dice, uncogged by
those three hoary sharpers, Prerogative, Patricianism, and Priestcraft.
Whoever has looked into the pamphlets published in England during the
Great Rebellion cannot but have been struck by the fact, that the
principles and practice of the Puritan Colony had begun to react with
considerable force on the mother country; and the policy of the
retrograde party there, after the Restoration, in its dealings with New
England, finds a curious parallel as to its motives (time will show
whether as to its results) in the conduct of the same party towards
America during the last four years.
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