Cambridge as Village and City 289 



in the Old World. To the founders of our Cam 

 bridge it had come as a rich inheritance. They 

 were not as the rough followers of Alaric or Hen- 

 gist. They had profited by the work of Roman 

 civilization, with its vast and subtle nexus of legal 

 and political ideas. In the hands of their fathers 

 had been woven the wonderful fabric of English 

 law ; they were familiar with parliamentary insti 

 tutions ; they had been brought up in a country 

 where the king s peace was better preserved than 

 anywhere else in Europe, and where at the same 

 time self-government was maintained in full vigour. 

 They had profited, moreover, by the scholastic 

 learning of the Middle Ages and the Greek schol 

 arship of the Renaissance ; nor was the newly 

 awakening spirit of scientific inquiry, visible in 

 Galileo and Gilbert, lost upon their keen and in 

 quisitive minds. These Puritans, heirs to what 

 was strongest and best in the world s culture, came 

 to Massachusetts Bay in order to put into practice 

 a theory of civil government in which the interests 

 both of liberty and of godliness seemed to them 

 likely to be best subserved. They came to plant 

 the most advanced civilization in the midst of 

 a heathen wilderness, and thus the selection of a 

 seat of government for the new commonwealth was 

 an affair of dignity and importance. 



