nd at
the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor
afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England
settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the
wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company.
There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing
in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly
self-evident as to need no argument.

While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community
are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea
that great _coup d'etat_ which is to create, almost in a day, a
practically independent American republic. Until this is accomplished
the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement
on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all
but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the
reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now,
that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter
conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it
across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other
planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what
then? This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of
English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual,
over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers
of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley
and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of
1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand
passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay. It was the
beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the king
and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only
transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival
about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families,
including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in
three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds
sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by
the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long
Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the
Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked