at that period very hard for religious liberality and a good school system to exist together.

There was a similar irregularity among the colonies in the number of university-trained men. Professor F. B. Dexter has shown that no less than sixty such men joined the Massachusetts Bay colony within ten years of its origin, while after seventeen years of separate existence the Virginia colony held but two university men, Rev. Hant Wyatt and Dr. Pott; and Rhode Island had also but two in its early days, Roger Williams and the recluse William Blaxton. No one has more fully recognized the "heavy price paid" for this "great cup of liberty" in Rhode Island than her able scholar, Professor Diman, who employed precisely these phrases to describe it in his Bristol address; and who fearlessly pointed out how much that State lost, even while she gained something, by the absence of that rigorous sway and that lofty public standard which were associated with the stern rule of the Puritan clergy.

In all the early colonies, unless we except Rhode Island, the Puritan spirit made itself distinctly felt, and religious persecution widely prevailed. Even in Maryland, as has been shown, the laws imposed branding and boring through the tongue as a penalty for certain opinions. In Virginia those who refused to attend the Established Church must pay, 200 pounds of tobacco for the first offence, 500 for the second, and incur banishment for the third. A fine of 5000 pounds of tobacco was placed upon unauthorized religious meetings. Quakers and Baptists were whipped or pilloried, and any ship-master conveying Nonconformists was fined. Even so late as 1741, after persecution had virtually ceased in New

England, severe laws were passed against Presbyterians in Virginia; and the above-named laws of Maryland were re-enacted in 1723. At an earlier period, however, the New England laws, if not severer, were no doubt more rigorously executed. In some cases, to be sure, the so-called laws, were a deliberate fabrication, as in the case of certain Connecticut "Blue Laws," a code reprinted to this day in the newspapers, but which existed only in the active and malicious imagination of the Tory Dr. Peters.

The spirit of persecution was strongest in the New England colonies, and chiefly in Massachusetts, because of the greater intensity with which men there followed out their convictions. It was less manifest in the banishment of Roger Williams-which was, after all, not so much a religious as a political transaction-than in the Quaker persecutions which took place between 1656 and 1660. Whatever minor elements may have entered into the matter, these were undoubtedly persecutions based on religious grounds, and are therefore to be utterly condemned. Yet they were not quite so bad as a class of persecutions which had become familiar in Europe-forbidding heretics to leave the realm, and then tormenting them if they stayed. Not a Quaker ever suffered death except for voluntary action—that is, for choosing to stay or to return after banishment. To demand that men should consent to be banished on pain of death seems to us an outrage; but it seemed quite otherwise, we must remember, to those who had already exiled themselves, in order to secure a spot where they could worship in their own way. Cotton Mather says, with some force:

'It was also thought that the very Quakers themselves would say that if they had got into a Corner of the World, and with an immense Toyl and Charge made a Wilderness habitable, on purpose there to be undisturbed in the Exercises of their Worship, they would never bear to have NewEnglanders come among them and interrupt their Publick Worship, endeavor to seduce their Children from it, yea, and repeat such Endeavors after mild Entreaties first, and then just Banishments, to oblige their departure."

We now see that this place they occupied was not a mere corner of the world, and that it was even then an essential part of the British dominions and subject to British laws. We can therefore see that this was not the whole of the argument, and the Quakers might well maintain that they had a legal right to exercise their religion in America. The colonists seem to me to have strained much too far the power given them in their patent to "encounter, expulse, repel, and resist" all invaders when they applied it to these unwarlike visitors. Yet the Quakers were in a sense invaders, nevertheless; their able defender, R. C. Hallowell, concedes as much when he entitles his history The Quaker Invasion of New England; and if an invasion it was, then Cotton Mather's argumentum ad hominem was quite to the point. Had the Quakers, like the Moravians, made settlements and cleared the forests for themselves, this argument would have been quite disarmed; and had those settlements been interfered with by the Puritans, the injustice would have been far more glaring; nor is it probable that the Puritans would have molested such colonies-unless they happened to be too near.

It must be remembered, too, that the Puritans did not view Quakers and other zealots as heretics merely,

but as dangerous social outlaws. There was among the colonists a genuine and natural fear that if the tide of extravagant fanaticism once set in, it might culminate in such atrocities as had shocked all Europe while the Anabaptists, under John of Leyden, were in power at Münster. In the frenzied and naked exhibitions of Lydia Wardwell and Deborah Wilson they saw tendencies which might end in uprooting all the social order for which they were striving, and might lead at last to the revocation of their charter. I differ with the greatest unwillingness from my old friend John G. Whittier in his explanation of a part of these excesses. He thinks that these naked performances came from persons who were maddened by seeing the partial exposure of Quakers whipped through the streets. This view, though

plausible, seems to me to overlook the highly wrought condition of mind among these enthusiasts, and the fact that they regarded everything as a symbol. When one of the very ablest of the Quakers, Robert Barclay, walked the streets of Aberdeen in sackcloth and ashes, he deemed it right to sacrifice all propriety for the sake of a symbolic act; and in just the same spirit we find the Quaker writers of that period defending these personal exposures, not by Whittier's reasons, but for symbolic ones. In Southey's Commonplace-Book there is a long extract, to precisely this effect, from the life of Thomas Story, an English Friend who had travelled in America. seems to have been a moderate man, and to have condemned some of the extravagances of the Ranters, but gravely argues that the Quakers might really have been commanded by God to exhibit their nakedness "as a sign."

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Whatever provocation the Friends may have given, their persecution is the darkest blot upon the history of the time-darker than witchcraft, which was a disease of supernatural terror. And like the belief in witchcraft, the spirit of persecution could only be palliated by the general delusion of the age, by the cruelty of the English legislation against the Jesuits, which the Puritan legislation closely followed as regarded Quakers; and in general by the attempt to unite Church and State, and to take the Old Testament for a literal modern statute-book. It must be remembered that our horror at this intolerance is also stimulated from time to time by certain extravagant fabrications which still appear as genuine in the newspapers; as that imaginary letter said to have been addressed by Cotton Mather to a Salem clergyman in 1682, and proposing that a colony of Quakers be arrested and sold as slaves. This absurd forgery appeared first in some Pennsylvania newspaper, accompanied by the assertion that this letter was in possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society. No such paper was ever known to that society; Cotton Mather was, at the time alleged, but nineteen years old, and the Quaker persecution had substantially ceased twenty years before. But when did such contradictions ever have any effect on the vitality of a lie?

The dark and intense convictions of Puritanism were seen at their sternest in the witchcraft trialsevents which took place in almost every colony at. different times. The wonder is that they showed themselves so much less in America than in most European nations at the same period. To see this delusion in its most frightful form, we must go beyond