dawning of the day after the night of bigotry and superstition in New England.
The one thing in which the Puritans appear to have made an innovation was in sawing lumber. Somewhere about 1640, saw-mills, then unknown in England, were introduced into Massachusetts. Some of the Puritans had seen saw-mills driven by water-power during their exile in Germany, and, strange to say, did not consider them a device of Satan to enslave men's souls.
In Aristopia every public school had a large library of books of useful knowledge, and every child attended school for twelve or fifteen years, studying not Latin and theology, but mathematics, geography, astronomy, and what was then known of chemical science. Improvement was a matter of course, and innovation which promised improvement was welcomed.
