nt having created the grantees and their assigns a
body corporate, they might transfer their charter and act in New
England."

He who well weighs the facts which have been presented in connection
with the principal emigration to Massachusetts, and other related facts
which will offer themselves to notice as we proceed, may find himself
conducted to the conclusion that when Winthrop and his associates
prepared to convey across the water a charter from the King which, they
hoped, would in their beginnings afford them some protection both from
himself and through him from the powers of Continental Europe, they had
conceived a project no less important than that of laying, on this side
of the Atlantic, the foundations of a nation of Puritan Englishmen,
foundations to be built upon as future circumstances should decide or
allow. It would not perhaps be pressing the point too far to say that in
view of the thick clouds that were gathering over their home, they
contemplated the possibility that the time was near at hand when all
that was best of what they left behind would follow them to these
shores; when a renovated England, secure in freedom and pure in
religion, would rise in North America; when a transatlantic English
empire would fulfil, in its beneficent order, the dreams of English
patriots and sages of earlier times.

If such were the aims of the members of the Massachusetts Company, it
follows that commercial operations were a merely incidental object of
their association. And, in fact, it does not appear that, as a
corporation, they ever held for distribution any property except their
land; or that they ever intended to make sales of their land in order to
a division of the profits among the individual freemen; or that a
freeman, by virtue of the franchise, could obtain a parcel of land even
for his own occupation; or that any money was ever paid for admission
into the company, as would necessarily have been done if any pecuniary
benefit was attached to membership. Several freemen of the
company--among others the three who were first named in the charter as
well as in the patent from the Council for New England--appear to have
never so much as attended a meeting. They were men of property and
public spirit, who, without intending themselves to leave their homes,
gave their influence and their money to encourage such as were disposed
to go out and establish religion and freedom in a new country.

The company had n