the Lord hath
increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to
teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase
to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar
school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New
England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able
to read and write.

[Sidenote: Their political condition.]

Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their
influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main
features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood
fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them
contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first
time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious
freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been
brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had
never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all
the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and
the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large
part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers.
Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to
colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among
the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds
religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer
diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and
organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the
Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother
country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she
had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But
the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the
worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at
home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in
all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and
members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual
re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and
immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English
Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and
invigorated by their personal independence and comf