the establishment of large estates tilled by tenants, laborers, or bondmen.
Here, too, circumstances rather than theory proved to be the decisive element: the climate and soil of New England, coupled with an abundance of land and scarcity of labor, made anything like feudalism impossible. It was not because the Puritans had objections to servitude or slavery that they turned from this type of agriculture; they held indentured white servants, tried to enslave the Indians, and used Negro bondmen wherever profitable. It was because they found that in a land of long winters, stony fields, and diversified crops, chattel bondage on a large scale was economically impossible. Controlled by factors beyond their mastery, the Puritans therefore spread over New England under the leadership of freehold farmers; and those who could not endure that arduous career or had no love for a toilsome life among hills and rocks, found an outlet for their capital and energies upon the high seas. From fisheries, the sacred cod and the bulky whale, and from trafficking in ports far and near, the economic directors of New England, whose descendants were to try their mettle with the descendants of Virginia planters in forum and field, accumulated fortunes rivaling in size the riches wrung from the spreading tobacco leaves of the Old Dominion.
These economic factors in turn had a profound effect upon the spirit and procedure of government. Broadly speaking, the political experience of the gentlemen, yeomen, and merchants who came to New England had been no different from that of the dominant classes in Virginia, but their settlement in communities rather than on plantations made the small, compact town, not the county, the unit of political life. As all but church members were for sixty years excluded from the suffrage in Massachusetts, the village church and state became identical—the democratic tendencies of the free congregation accustomed to prayer and exhortation aiding the process of government by discussion.
