Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/43

Puritanism and New England. 11 New England. It is the fashion to speak of " cavalier" Virginia and "republican" New England; to regard the one as representing the aristocratic, the other the plebeian element in English life. That is but a faint approximation to the truth. More correct would it be to say that both mainly represented the English middle class, the class of the yeoman and the trader, neither being exclusively drawn from one or the other; but that natural conditions developed in Virginia a landed aristocracy, in New England a type of community which might either be called a wide and modified oligarchy or a restricted and severely conditioned democracy. In Virginia power insensibly found its way into the hands of the landholders ; the great bulk of the population, the servants and bondsmen, whether white or black, stood outside the body politic. In the various New England colonies political rights were fenced in by religious qualifications more or less severe; but there was nothing which could be called a class permanently excluded from power. Citizenship was within the reach of all. In Virginia there was no sort of corporate union below that of the State. A New England colony was made up of a number of smaller organisms, each with an intensely strong sense of corporate life. In both colonies a community far removed from the nominal centre of government, conscious of needs and aspirations which its rulers wholly ignored or misunderstood, drifted into half-conscious republicanism. But though the political creeds of the New Englander and the Virginian may have been in theory much the same, they were held in very different fashions. The Virginian might be roused by an act of tyranny into passionate self-assertion, but he was incapable of that patient watchful- ness, that continuous and systematic building-up of barriers against any possible encroachment which formed so large a part of the political history of New England. In the fullest sense the New England colonies were the offspring and embodiment of Puritanism. The desire for a certain form of worship prompted their formation, and certain theological beliefs and moral principles were the underlying forces which determined their growth. Moreover it was Congregationalism, far more than any other influence, which determined the political form that the New England colonies were to take, and the spirit which directed and animated that form. The Swiss religious reformers regarded the individual Church, however small and externally unimportant, as being potentially an independent corporation. "Hongg and Kussnacht," said Zwingli, "is a truer Church than all the bishops and popes together." In the Old World such a view could not rise beyond the expression of a pious aspiration ; in America it became in a sense a practical truth. The antecedents of the New Englander and his conditions of life predisposed him to republicanism ; and this republicanism easily became a reality when it found an appropriate machinery created ready to its hand, en. i.