The physical, mental, and spiritual characteristics of the Saxons need no long description. We find them, in their crudest state, portrayed with unmistakable fidelity in the pages of Tacitus, the greatest Roman writer of philosophic history; and no less clearly presented in the record of civilization for nineteen Christian centuries. The scholar and Saxon Charthe world are equally well acquainted with acteristics. the Saxons' strong bodies and strong appetites; their resolute courage in fighting wind and sea, fog and cold; their excesses in gluttony and drunkenness ; their love of home and children; their stern and undemonstrative temper, kindled most by patriotism and family affection; their Hebraic belief in the one, awful, vengeance-repaying Power; their equally strong belief in the responsibility and the possibilities of the individual man; and their capability of adapting themselves to new circumstances, and of assimilating such foreign elements as may come into their way. Teutons, with these characteristics, pass from the Continent to Britain in the fifth century, and from Britain to America in the seventeenth ; little by little they crowd their predecessors backward and downward, or shape them into new forms, until of the five great nations of the world, at the close of the nineteenth century, three are Teutonic-akin in race, in speech, and in general attitude toward religion and social progress. Two of these three nations read each other's books and periodicals, have a constant interchange of material and intellectual goods, and are in essentials but a single folk.* *"I will say that one idea has been strongly impressed upon me, and that is the belief that the peoples of America and England are really iden For years the first settlers in New England and Virginia were like Englishmen making a long visit in The English a foreign country. They came from a fully in America. matured nation, and had no idea of giving up relations with those whom they had left, or of forming a new nation for themselves. Their separation from home characteristics and influences, and their purposes for the future, did not in all respects resemble the wider separation and the strictly selfish purposes of the Saxon settlers in Celtic Britain. The Saxons left all behind them, in an age of infrequent communication between land and land; the Englishmen in America were ever watching the lessening sails of the homeward bark, and eagerly welcoming those newly come from their ancestral villages beyond the sea. In New England, to be sure, the colonists were possessed by a profound religious purpose, at variance with that prevailing at home; but nevertheless they brought with them, and applied to the development of this purpose, every race-characteristic of the Englishmen of the times of James I. They planned to found colonies of the English nation, and of course had a firm belief in the general utility of English institutions, social customs, laws, education, and family management. Their village-idea, all important in the development of the new country, was the Saxon one. Everywhere they adapted, but they seldom created. And after two centuries and a half, tical in character. We have our special difficulties at home, and you have yours here; but the people of the two countries are really the same at bottom. I have always believed this, but my visit here has confirmed my former idea entirely.”—MATTHEW ARNOLD; reported in the New York Tribune, March 8, 1884. the Englishman who comes to America finds the race unchanged in all important matters, and feels that change and development and growth-or lack of development and growth, if he so call it-have not destroyed or concealed the race-type and the race-work.* Pilgrims and Puritans in New England. New England, in 1620 and the following years, was thus settled mainly by people of pure English stock, and the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, whatever their small differences at first, were at one in their firm religious purpose. Two types of Christians have ever been found in the churches; and, indeed, these two types may be noted in the number of those who associated with, or directly followed, Christ himself. The first consists of those whose struggles with temptation and sin are aided by times and seasons, by cathedrals and cloisters, by vestments and ceremonies, by prayerbooks and church calendars; the second consists of those who, like the eagle, look upon the strongest sunlight with undazzled eye,-who, upon the lonely heights of spiritual exaltation, or in the depths of virtually pessimistic self-abasement, commune directly with Jehovah, scorning all human help. The two classes must exist until the end of time; either may run toward religious excesses, but both contain germs of good, and have nobly contributed * In the few days which I have as yet spent in the third England, it is the likeness, not the unlikeness, to the second England which strikes me. I have often to go through a distinct process of thought to remind myself that I am in New England, and not in middle England still."-EDWARD A. FREEMAN; lecture in New York, Feb. 11, 1882. to the world's civilization. In the early part of the seventeenth century the ritual class had the upper hand in England, therefore no small portion of the independents founded a New England, upon the basis of the social institutions of the old island, as modified by a somewhat narrow but terribly earnest theocratic idea. They carried out the principles of Wycliffe, Tyndale, Luther, Calvin, Latimer; but insisted upon viewing the words of these masters, even, in the light of their own interpretation of the Bible itself. They lived in New England as those holding a corner of the world for God and righteousness, as measured by themselves; against prelates, papists, Baptists, Quakers, and heathen. The ballot was in the hands of the freeman, but the freeman was the church-member, and the church-member was subject to the goverment of the local church. They gave up lesser pleasures for the great inward. joy of self-surrender to the right, as they understood it. They likened themselves, not without reason, to the children of Israel in the wilderness; and in them the half-Hebraic temper of the Christianized Saxons appeared in full. The individual before his God— such was the Pilgrim or Puritan of Plymouth, Salem, and Boston. The mistakes and the triumphs of these brave and self-reliant settlers lie at the very root of the intellectual life of New England for two centuries and a half. They made the American nation and American literature possible. Without William Bradford and John Winthrop, as I have said before, we could not have had Emerson and Hawthorne. Their very limitations, the narrow lines upon which their desperate earnestness worked, made them the best of pioneers. If they failed to develop the fullest manhood, they avoided the dangers of half-belief and of loose morals, most destructive at the outset of any colonial history. They were Old-Testament Christians. erty in New It seems almost an anomaly to aver that the Massachusetts colonists were exceptionally favored in their opportunities for a peaceful working out of a religious, political, and social problem, with its inevitable intellectual corollary. It is true that during the Early Libseventeenth century the horrors or dangers England. of Indian warfare constantly kept within sight; the colonists' meeting-houses were military posts; the men carried guns to the place of worship, and were in constant readiness to transmute spiritual warfare into earthly conflict. But not often have religious theorizers had so good an opportunity to put principles into practice. The early New Englanders were untrammelled by dominant customs, by political machinery, or by the menace of domestic or foreign war. The battles of King Philip's war made less local disturbance for them than did Marston Moor for old England. Statecraft and politics were in the hands of the American Puritans in a sense by no means true in the case of their fellowsympathizers under Cromwell. In considering the intellectual and political history of America, too much stress can hardly be laid upon the independence possessed by the New England colonists from the first. They desired to erect a Congregational theocracy on new soil; to regulate major and minor |