The benevolence of the Puritans appears from other examples. Their thoughts were always fixed on posterity. Domestic discipline was highly valued; the law was severe against the undutiful child; it was also severe against a faithless parent. Till 1654, the laws did not permit any man's person to be kept in prison for debt, except when there was an appearance of some estate which the debtor would not produce. Even the brute creation was not forgotten; and cruelty towards animals was a civil offence. The sympathies of the colonists were wide; a regard for Protestant Germany is as old as emigration; and during the thirty years' war the people of New England held fasts and offered prayers for the success of their German brethren.

The first years of the residence of Puritans in America were years of great hardship and affliction; this short season of distress was promptly followed by abundance and happiness. The people struck root in the soil immediately. They were, from the first, industrious, enterprising, and frugal; and affluence followed of course. When persecution ceased in England, there were already in New England "thousands who would not change their place for any other in the world;" and they were tempted in vain with. invitations to the Bahama Isles, to Ireland, to Jamaica, to Trinidad. The purity of morals completes the picture of colonial felicity. "As Ireland will not brook venomous beasts, so will not that land vile livers." One might dwell there "from year to year, and not see a drunkard, or hear an oath, or meet a beggar." "As a consequence, the average duration of life in New England, compared with Europe of that day, was doubled; and, of all who were born into the world, more than two in ten, full four in nineteen, attained the age of seventy. Of those who lived beyond ninety, the proportion, as compared with European tables of longevity, was still more remarkable.

I have dwelt the longer on the character of the early Puritans of New England, for they were the parents of one third the whole white population of the United States as it was in 1834. Within the first fifteen years, and there was never afterwards any considerable increase from Eng

land, we have seen that there came over twenty-one thousand two hundred persons, or four thousand families. Their descendants were in 1834 not far from four millions. Each family had multiplied on the average to one thousand souls. To New York and Ohio, where they then constituted half the population, they carried the Puritan system of free schools; and their example is spreading it through the civilized world.

Historians have loved to eulogize the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits, of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the Puritans, from the fear of God. The knights obeyed the law of honor; the Puritans hearkened to the voice of duty. The knights were proud of loyalty; the Puritans, of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honor, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the Puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bow at the name of Jesus, nor bend the knee to the King of kings. Chivalry delighted in outward show, favored pleasure, multiplied amusements, and degraded the human race by an exclusive respect for the privileged classes; Puritanism bridled the passions, commanded the virtues of self-denial, and rescued the name of man from dishonor. The former valued courtesy; the latter, justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually increasing weight and knowledge and opulence of the industrious classes; the Puritans, rallying upon those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty.

The golden age of Puritanism was passing away. 1660. Time was silently softening its asperities, and the revolutions of England prepared an era in its fortunes. Massachusetts never acknowledged Richard Cromwell; it read in the aspect of parties the impending restoration. The protector had left the benefits of self-government and

the freedom of commerce to New England and to Virginia; and Maryland, by the act of her inhabitants, was just beginning to share in the same advantages. Would 1660. the dynasty of the Stuarts deal benevolently with the colonies? Would it imitate the magnanimity of Cromwell, and suffer the staple of the south still to seek its market freely throughout the world? Could the returning monarch forgive the friends of the Puritans in England? Would he show favor to the institutions that the outcasts had reared beyond the Atlantic?

CHAPTER XI.

THE RESTORATION OF THE STUARTS.

THE principles that should prevail in the administration of the American colonies always formed a dividing question between the political parties in England. The restoration of the legitimate dynasty was attended by a corresponding change in colonial policy.

1660.

The revolution, which was now come to its end, had been in its origin a democratic revolution, and had apparently succeeded in none of its ultimate purposes. In the gradual progress of civilization, the power of the feudal aristocracy had been broken by the increased authority of the monarch; and the people, beginning to claim the lead in the progress of humanity, prepared to contend for equality against privilege, as well as for freedom against prerogative. The contest failed for a season, because too much was at once attempted. Immediate emancipation from the decaying institutions of the past was impossible; hereditary inequalities were themselves endeared to the nation, from a love for the beneficent institutions with which close union had identified them; the mass of the people was still buried in the inactivity of listless ignorance; even for the strongest minds, public experience had not yet generated the principles by which a reconstruction of the government on a popular basis could have been safely undertaken; and thus the democratic revolution in England was a failure, alike from the events and passions of the fierce struggle which rendered moderation impossible, and from the misfortune of the age, which had not as yet acquired the political knowledge that time alone could gather for the use of later generations.

1629 to

1610.

Charles I., inheriting his father's belief in the right of the king of England to absolute monarchical

1640.

Apr. 6.

power, and conspiring against the national constitution, which he, as the most favored among the natives of England, was the most solemnly bound to protect, had resolved to govern without the aid of a parliament. To convene a parliament was therefore, in itself, an acknowledgment of defeat. The house of commons, which assembled in April, 1640, was filled with men not less loyal to the monarch than faithful to the people; yet the king, who had neither the resignation of wise resolution nor yet the daring of despair, perpetually vacillating between the desire of destroying English liberty and a timid respect for its forms, disregarded the wishes of his more prudent friends, and, under the influence of capricious passion, suddenly dissolved a parliament more favorable May 5. to his interests than any which he could again hope from the excitement of the times. The friends of the popular party were elated at the dissolution. "This parliament could have remedied the confusion," said the royalist Hyde, afterwards Earl of Clarendon, to Saint-John. The countenance of the sombre republican, usually clouded with gloom, beamed with cheerfulness as he replied: "All is well; things must be worse before they can be better; this parliament could never have done what is necessary to be done." The exercise of absolute power was become more difficult than ever. Strafford had advised violent measures. There were those who refused to take the oath never to consent to alterations in the church of England. "Send for the chief leaders," wrote Strafford, "and lay them by the heels; no other satisfaction is to be thought of." But Strafford was not without his enemies among the royalists. During the suspension of parliament, two parties in the cabinet had disputed with each other the administration. and the emoluments of despotism. The power of the ministers and the council of state was envied by the ambition of the queen and the greedy selfishness of the courtiers; and the arrogant Strafford and the unbending Laud had as bitter rivals in the palace as they had enemies in the nation. There was no unity among the friends of absolute power.