ut
here was Calvinism cut off from its European roots and from the reaction
and influence of Christian civilization. Its records read like those of
a madhouse where religious maniacs have broken loose and locked up their
keepers. We hear of men stoned to death for kissing their wives on the
Sabbath, of lovers pilloried or flogged at the cart's tail for kissing
each other at all without licence from the deacons, the whole
culminating in a mad panic of wholesale demonism and witchburning so
vividly described in one of the most brilliant of Mrs. Gaskell's
stories, "Lois the Witch." Of course, in time the fanaticism of the
first New England settlers cooled into something like sanity. But a
strong Puritan tradition remained and played a great part in American
history. Indeed, if Lee, the Virginian, has about him something of the
Cavalier, it is still more curious to note that nineteenth-century New
England, with its atmosphere of quiet scholars and cultured tea parties,
suddenly flung forth in John Brown a figure whose combination of
soldierly skill with maniac fanaticism, of a martyr's fortitude with a
murderer's cruelty, seems to have walked straight out of the seventeenth
century and finds its nearest parallel in some of the warriors of the
Covenant.

The colonies so far enumerated owe their foundation solely to English
enterprise and energy; but in the latter half of the seventeenth century
foreign war brought to England a batch of colonies ready made. At the
mouth of the Hudson River, between Maryland and the New England
colonies, lay the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. The first colonists
who had established themselves there had been Swedes, but from Sweden
its sovereignty had passed to Holland, and the issue of the Dutch wars
gave it to the English, by whom it was re-christened New York in honour
of the King's brother, afterwards James II. It would perhaps be
straining the suggestion already made of the persistent influences of
origins to see in the varied racial and national beginnings of New York
a presage of that cosmopolitan quality which still marks the greatest
of American cities, making much of it a patchwork of races and
languages, and giving to the electric stir of Broadway an air which
suggests a Continental rather than an English city, but it is more
plausible to note that New York had no original link with the Puritanism
of New England and of the North generally, and that in fact we shall
find the prem