ts by interrogation on oath, imprisoned them, if they
remained lawfully silent and condemned them if they honestly confessed!

A congregation of these sectaries had existed for some time on the
boundaries of Lincoln, Nottingham and York, under the guidance of
Richard Clifton and John Robinson, the latter of whom was a modest,
polished, and learned man. This christian fold was organized about 1602;
but worried by ceaseless persecution, it fled to Holland, where its
members, fearing they would be absorbed in the country that had
entertained them so hospitably, resolved in 1620 to remove to that
portion of the great American wilderness, known as North Virginia. Such,
in the chronology of our Continent, was the first decisive emigration of
our parent people to the New World, _for the sake of opinion_.

It is neither my purpose, nor is it necessary, to sketch the subsequent
history of this New England emigration, or of the followers, who swelled
it into colonial significance.

Its great characteristic, seems to me, to have been, an unalterable will
to worship God according to _its_ own sectarian ideas, and to afford an
equal right and protection to all who thought as _it_ did, or were
willing to conform to its despotic and anchoritic austerity. It is not
very clear, what were its notions of abstract political liberty; yet
there can be very little doubt what its practical opinions of equality
must have been, when we remember the common dangers, duties, and
interests of such a band of emigrants on the dreary, ice-bound, savage
haunted, coasts of Massachusetts.

"_When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Pray who was then the gentleman?_"

may well be asked of a community which for so long a time, had been the
guest of foreigners, and now saw the first great human and divine law of
liberty and equality, taught by the compulsion of labor and mutual
protection, on a strip of land between the sea and the forest. The
colonists were literally reduced to first principles; they were stripped
of the comforts, pomps, ambitions, distinctions, of the Old World, and
they embraced the common destiny of a hopeful future in the New.[4] They
had been persecuted for their opinions, but that did not make them
tolerant of the opinions of their persecutors. It was better, then, that
oppressor and oppressed should live apart in both hemispheres; and thus,
in sincerity, if not in justice, their future history exhibits many bad
examples of the ma