fending these personal exposures, not by Mr. Whittier's reasons, but for symbolic ones. In Southey's "CommonplaceBook" there is a long extract, to precisely this effect, from the life of Thomas Story, an English Friend who had travelled in

based upon the noble decree passed by its General Assembly in 1649:

"No person whatsoever in this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be any way troubled or molested for his or her religion, or in the free exercise thereof, or any way compelled to the belief or exercise of any other re`igion against his or her consent."

But it is never hard to evade a statute that seems to secure religious liberty, and this decree did not prevent the Maryland colony from afterwards enacting that if any person should deny the Holy Trinity he should first be bored through the tongue and fined or imprisoned; that for the second offence he should be branded as a blasphemer, the letter "B" being stamped on his forehead; and for the third offence should die. This was certainly a very limited toleration; and granting that it has a partial value, it remains an interesting question who secured it. Cardinal Manning and others have claimed this measure of toleration as due to the Roman Catholics, but Mr. E. D. Neill has conclusively shown that the Roman Catholic element was originally much smaller than was supposed, that the "two hundred Catholic gentlemen" usually claimed as founding the colony were really some twenty gentlemen and three hundred laboring men; that of the latter twelve died on shipboard, of whom only two confessed to the priests, thus giving a clew to the probable opinions of the rest; and that of the Assembly which passed. the resolutions the majority were Protestants, and even Puritans. But granting to Maryland a place next to Rhode Island in religious freedom, she paid, like that other colony, what was then the penalty of freedom, and I must dwell a moment on this.

In those days religious liberty brought a heterogeneous and often reckless population; it usually involved the absence of a highly educated ministry; and this implied the want of a settled system of education, and of an elevated standard of public duty. These deficiencies left both in Rhode Island and in Maryland certain results which are apparent to this day. There

is nothing more extraordinary in the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies than the promptness with which they entered on the work of popular instruction. These little communities, just struggling for existence, marked out an educational system which had then hardly a parallel in the European world. In the Massachusetts Bay colony, Salem had a free school in 1640, Boston in 1642, or earlier, Cambridge about the same time, and the State, in 1647, marked out an elaborate system of common and grammar schools for every township-a system then without a precedent, so far as I know, in Europe. Thus ran the essential sentences of this noble document, held up to the admiration of all England by Lord Macaulay in Parliament:

"Yt learning may not be buried in ye grave of or fathrs in ye church and comonwealth, the Lord assisting or endeavors-It is therefore ordred, yt evry township in this iurisdiction, aftr ye Lord heth increased ym to ye number of 50 household's, shall then forthwth appoint one wthin their towne to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and reade; ... and it is furth ordered, yt where any towne shall increase to ye numb of 100 families or househoulds, they shall set up a gramer schoole, ye mr thereof being able to instruct youth so farr as they may be fited for ye university.”

The printing-press came with these schools, or before them, and was actively employed, and it is impossible not to recog nize the contrast between such institutions and the spirit of that Governor of Virginia (Berkeley) who said, a quarter of a century later, "We have no free schools nor printing, and I hope shall not have these hundred years." In Maryland, convicts and indented servants were sometimes advertised for sale as teachers at an early day, and there was no public system until 1728. In Rhode Island, Newport had a public-school in 1640, but it apparently lasted but a year or two, nor was there a general system till the year 1800. These contrasts are mentioned for one sole purpose: to show that no single community unites all virtues, and that it was 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 ablest scholar, Professor Diman, who employs precisely these phrases to describe it in his Bristol address; and who fearlessly points 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 persecu tion 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. 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 the 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 Williamswhich 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 New-Englanders 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"