oom for the distinctions of rank. Power, with
them, resided in the masses; the results of their labor were common
stock; their interests were one and the same. Add to these facts their
ancient hatred of the aristocracy, and we have the influences Under
which New England has ever tended to republicanism. The Puritan race has
ever been republican to the core, and this is one great and vital
respect in which they have continually diverged from their Southern
brethren.

Yet with, all their virtues, with all their sublime heroism, was blended
an inordinate, morbid selfishness. Shut in within their little republic
from all Communion with the outer world, lacking the healthful
influences of conflicting ideas and that moral attrition which polishes
the cosmopolitan man, enlarging his views of life and giving broader
scope as well to the active energies of the soul as to the kinder
sympathies and benevolent sensibilities of the heart, this little
community became more set in their traditional opinions, and gradually
imbibed a hearty contempt for all beyond the pale of their own religious
belief, which soon extended to all without the bounds which
circumscribed their narrow settlements. Living alike, thinking alike,
feeling alike, placing under solemn ban all speculations in religion,
and even all research into the deeper mysteries of natural science,
grinding with iron heel the very germ of intellectual progress, in their
blind presumption they would have closed the doors of heaven itself upon
all mankind save the called and elected of the Puritan faith. This
intellectual life was one of mere abstractions, and as a natural
consequence all their thoughts and emotions, their joys and sorrows,
their loves and hatreds, became morbid to the last degree. But the bent
bow will seek release; the reaction came at last, and the astonishing
mental progress of the New England of to-day, the wild speculation upon
all questions of morals and religion, rivalling in their daring scope
the most impious theories of the German metaphysicians, which our New
England fosters and sustains, and above all, the proverbial trickery of
the Yankee race, are but the reaction of the stern and gloomy tenets of
that olden time which would have made of our earth a charnel house
crowded with mouldering bones.

In the midst of this intensely morbid Puritan life, no more eligible
object could have been presented for the exercise of their bitterest
antipathies tha