emed needful in her rulers, have yet, by
inborn strength of mind and lofty public spirit, shown themselves in all
things worthy of high office."

Certainly William Bradford showed himself worthy the trust and
confidence of his fellows. For nearly forty years he filled the office
of governor of the Plymouth colony. His hand guided it through the
perils of its early years, his brain planned that systematic development
of its slender resources that made it the one successful episode in
America's beginnings. His treatment of the Indians was always firm but
friendly; his dealings with the grasping "London adventurers," whose
greed would have seriously crippled the colony had it not been for his
restraining hand, were courteous but convincing; it was Bradford who led
the colony from the unsatisfactory communism of its first years to the
system of individual property that, from 1623, held sway, and turned an
uncertain venture into a career of industrial prosperity. Always
tolerant, never injudicious, and alike pure-minded, liberty-loving,
courageous, and wise, no hand could have better guided than did his, or
have more systematically shaped, the destinies of the infant State. The
testimony of contemporaries and the judgment of historians unite in
crediting to William Bradford that rare combination of intelligence and
industry, of judicial and executive ability, by which a small and
obscure band of persecuted fugitives laid in an unexplored wilderness
the foundations of a great and prosperous commonwealth.

His methods were as simple as was his own noble nature. Each advance was
the outgrowth of his own observation and the colony's necessities, and
while the corner-stone of the community was religion, he stood himself
for religious liberty, and never permitted the zeal of his associates to
degenerate into intolerance and persecution. While other of the early
American colonies were narrow, bigoted, and vindictive, it is to the
credit of the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth that the cargo of the Mayflower
contained no seeds of persecution, and throughout the long
administration of Governor William Bradford the colony he guided had, in
his time at least, a clear comprehension of the meaning of religious and
political freedom, and did not descend into the harrying of so-called
heretics, the scourging of Quakers, nor the burning of witches. Whatever
intolerance of this sort may, at a later day, have stained the records
of the colony, was