shares and bonds are held by English men and women, we have had such swindles as the Emma Mine and the Canadian Oil Wells. The greed for exorbitant profits-the speculative propensity is at the bottom of the success of all these gigantic impositions. Last in date, but happily least in success, comes the Co-operative Credit Bank, appealing to the 'industrial classes,' and promising 18 per cent. interest on deposits, and a share in profits up to 30 per cent., by means of the most risky speculative transactions, such as 'operations. in shares and stocks.' This scheme has been exposed in time, and the designs of the promoters have been baulked. The Times,' too, is very full of virtuous indignation just now (perhaps it is righteous over much '), but it would have been more to its credit had it warned the public at first, when it knew how and by whom these financial schemes were being floated.

But all these things demonstrate the existence of a deeprooted disease which has eaten like a canker into the heart of society, and whose virus has infected all classes and both sexes of our population. It is the eager haste to be rich, and the preference of speculative ventures to the slow processes of industry and economy, which alone renders possible the success of deceitful foreign loans and gigantic schemes of railway and mining imposture. Blame the active agents in the several swindles as we may, their operations could never have succeeded unless the moral fibre of the public had been deteriorated by the predominance of the spirit of gambling, and the only certain cure of the evil is the extirpation or proper regulation of the speculative propensity. We trust the press will succeed in stamping out the insidious proposal of a Night Exchange for the West End of London. It would vastly intensify the mischief; and with the knowledge we have of the scandalous results of nocturnal gambling of the same sort in Paris and New York, we protest against the scheme in the interests of public morality.

139

ART. VI. Disestablishment in New England.

PERHAPS no part of the history of man more requires for its faithful comprehension the application of the rule, 'Put 'yourself in his place,' than the early history of New England, or has suffered more of misconception for the want of that application. Had it, like Canada, remained to this day a dependency of the mother country, many things would have appeared, and would have been, perfectly natural, which in the light of actual political and social changes seem to require explanation.

First of all, it should never be forgotten that the founders of New England were Englishmen of the early part of the seventeenth century. As such, while exceptional in those respects which led to their emigration, they were still strongly marked by the peculiarities of their age and country. They had no ambition to found a new nation. It was a great cross to them to be driven to that necessity. Nothing could have pleased them better than to have seen King James's policy so far modified as to have made it possible for them to stay at home with a good conscience. They sincerely believed that, in the main, the government was right in its fundamental principles, only mistaken in its application of them; right in rigidly ruling with reference to spiritual things, wrong only in the data by which that rule was determined; right in compelling men as to their Church polity, wrong only as to the kind of polity which was the object of such compulsion. It would be the height of absurdity, therefore, to expect that when landed, after a voyage of three thousand miles, in the North American wilderness, such Englishmen should launch themselves at once into the middle of the nineteenth century. Clearly the only course natural to them was-mutatis mutandis -to reproduce as well as they could on the western side of the Atlantic the mother country, as they thought she ought to be, and as-if they had had the power-they would have made her to be, at home. Those who came the nearest to being exceptional to this were the Plymouth men. They had tarried long enough on the continent to have become in some

things modified by its influences; while the very character of their separatism, intensified by the malignant persecutions to which they had been subjected, had pushed them to the forefront of those thinkers of their time whose faces looked toward the better day of civil and religious freedom that was dawning.

The fact that the settlement of New England had a distinctively religious intent, which found recognition in the earlier charters,* is one important to be remembered in this connection; inasmuch as such an intent would, on the one hand, make probable and justify a closeness of supervision by the new colonies as to the quality of the religion which might seek development in them, which would scarcely be natural in settlements looking purely towards commercial or political ends; while, on the other, it would give fair warning in advance to all intending emigrants that they must expect to find some special stringency guarding that department of the colonial administration, which, if it threatened to be distasteful, could most wisely be avoided by going elsewhere.

It is significant that the Articles of Confederation by which, early in 1643, the four colonies of New Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Newhaven became joined as The United Colonies of New England, lay down, as the fundamental article of union, the following:-'Whereas wee all came into 'these parts of America with one and the same end and ayme, 'namely, to advaunce the kingdome of our Lord Jesus Christ,

In the hope thereby to advance the in Largement of Christian religion, to the glory of God Almighty, . . . which tendeth to the reducing and conversion of such sauages as remaine wandering in Desolacion and distress to civil societie and Christian Religion. ... And, lastly, because the principall effect which we can desire or expect of this action, is the Conversion and Reduction of the people in those Parts unto the true worship of God and Christian religion, in which Respect, wee would be loath that any Person should be permitted to pass that way suspected to affect the Superstition of the Church of Rome; Wee do hereby declare that it is our will and pleasure that none be permitted to pass, in any Voyage from time to time to be made into the said Country, but such as shall first have taken the Oathe of Supremacy,' &c.-'The Great Patent of New England' (Roll 2231, Record Office).

'May win and invite the Natives of the Countrey to the knowledge and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind, and the Christian faith; which, in our Royal Intentions, and the Adventurers' free profession, is the only and principal end of this Plantation,' &c.-'Charter of Connecticut' (Hazard, ii. 602).

and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospell in puritie with 'peace,' &c.*

It seems quite a matter of course that such men, so situated, should proceed to legislate religion into their State. It had been the way of their fathers. It was the way of their brethren at home, only the religion was not to their taste. It was contemplated in their own organic law. With the light they had, it was not merely a just and right procedure, but it appeared to be the only alternative to an intolerable. anarchy; while the Scripture-upon the close interpretation of which they had been thrown by all their reasonings about Church polity-seemed to command them to seek first 'the 'kingdom of God and his righteousness,' with the promise that all needful secular prosperity should be added' unto them.

The Plymouth Colony began as a voluntary association subject to the will of its majority, as applied to each individual case when it arose, and not to a code of laws. It might be safe to say that, in the first decade of its struggle for life, its use of the enacting power was scarcely more or other than if its members had been living still in Leyden under purely Church rule. All had not indeed been members of that Church, nor were all members of any Church; yet the prominent men were such, and the regnant influences were in keeping with that fact. All the legislative acts of this colony, of which we have any knowledge during its first twelve years, could easily be printed in legible type upon a single octavo page. No provision was made therein for the support of the gospel, because the maintenance of the ministry was quietly assured in the affection of the colonists, without the intervention of law. Such a people, of simple manners, rigid principles, and warm-hearted piety, living mainly in each other's eye, and under the close observation of their venerated elder, might be expected to maintain, for a time at least, essential integrity of conduct, without resorting to much help from the

Plymouth Colony Records,' ix. 3. See also in this connection the remarkable paper entitled, 'Reasons to be considered for Justifieinge the Undertakeres of the Intended Plantation in New England.'-Hutchinson's Original Papers,' &c. 27; but in its best form in R. C. Winthrop's 'Life of John Winthrop,' i. 309.

secular arm. But as their clearings were pushed into the wilderness, as trade and commerce began to offer at once opportunity and temptation, and as strangers, who lacked sympathy with their central religious idea, and in whose eyes gain outranked godliness, began to come in among them, it became necessary to agree upon the fundamentals of civil power, to define the relations of magistrates and people, and to establish suitable laws upon some just foundation. Chiefly --because to settle this was to determine all-it was needful to designate the qualifications of the freeman having the right to voting citizenship. The Old Colony was not hasty in her action on this subject. The Mayflower compact of the 1121 Nov., 1620, had inaugurated an infant State, and had made its signers members of the same. Naturally here was the point of departure. Until 1656 they seem to have been satisfied with admitting by vote such individual applicants as they thought would be suitable and useful, without enacting any general law whatever as to qualifications. Then they ordered that it should be essential to membership of the State that a candidate be propounded by the deputy of the town where he lived, after having been approved by his fellowtownsmen. In 1658 it was decreed that candidates should be propounded during the space of a year, from one June Court to another, before reception.† In 1671 a further step was taken, and it was enacted that besides being propounded for the space of a twelvemonth, a candidate must produce the testimony of his neighbours that he was ' of sober and peaceable 'conversation, Orthodox in the Fundamentals of Religion, and 'such as have also twenty pounds rateable estate, at the least, ' in the Government.' The scope of the clause which we have here italicised would seem to be determined by the phraseology of a law of 1658, which forbids manifest opposers of the true 'worship of God' § the privilege of being freemen; and by a further clause in the law of 1671, which provides that apos'tates from the fundamentals of religion' may be disfranchised; that is, it was not required by the Plymouth men that a colonist should join one of their Churches in order to acPlym. Col. Rec.' iii. 101. + Ibid. xi. 79.

‡

Brigham's 'Compact, Charter, and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth,' § Ibid. 113. || Ibid. 258

&c., 259.