10 



"the regal authority could not suspend the execution of 

 laws, except by the consent of Parliament." They had 

 learned that great law of the State, which, in 1G40, 

 Pym laid down when he spoke for the privileges belong- 

 insf to the hiffh court of Parliament, and which Lord 

 Keuyon still later announced, when he claimed that the 

 Houses of Parliament protected the liberties of England. 

 It was doctrines like these, which were brought to these 

 shores not by the ignorant and adventurous, but by 

 the wisest and most thoughtful scholars of that age, 

 by the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, by those 

 who brought from the banks of the Cam and the Iris 

 that free and independent culture which for more than 

 two centuries has made the banks of the Charles as 

 sacred in the New World as those classic rivers are in 

 the Old. The principles of free government, which 

 the Englishman had proclaimed for generations, against 

 the overshadowing power of the throne, and which had 

 served in his native land as the vital force of a revo- 

 lution, found here a genial soil, and became at once, 

 in the entire absence of all civil organization, the strong- 

 est and most useful system in the laud. Not then as 

 theorists, not as investigators, not as mere inquirers, 

 but as the custodians of a mature and well organized 

 system, did the colonists commence and carry on their 

 work. They were the heirs of careful culture, powerful 

 intellects, and firm and defiant will. They had been 

 taught in the best schools of industry and enterprise. 

 They were good merchants, good mechanics, good fiirmers, 

 good manufacturers, in a homely fashion. They were 

 thoughtful theologians, and laid down the plan of salva- 

 tion with as much definiteness and method as they fixed 

 the boundary lines of their possessions and planted their 

 sacred land-marks. They were neither crude nor iuex- 



