ON THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 131 
Now the difficulty with this sort of historic criticism 
is that it deals too much in vague generalities and 
quite overlooks the fact that there were Puritans and 
Puritans, that the God-fearing men of that stripe were 
not all cast in the same mould, like Professor Clerk 
Maxwell’s atoms. I have more than once heard people 
allude to the restriction of the suffrage to church mem- 
bers in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut, which is very much as if one were to make state- 
ments about the despotic government of Czar Nicholas 
and Queen Victoria. Still more frequently do people 
confound the men of Plymouth with the very different 
company that founded Boston. As to Mrs. Hemans, 
her remark was not so very far from the truth if 
restricted to the colony of the Pilgrims, about which 
she was writing. On the whole, the purpose of that 
little band of Pilgrims was to secure freedom to wor- 
ship after their own fashion, and similar freedom they 
were measurably ready to accord to those who came 
among them. They had witnessed in Holland the 
good effects of religious liberty, and their attitude of 
mind was largely determined by the strong personal 
qualities of such men as John Robinson, William 
Bradford, and Edward Winslow, who were all noted for 
breadth, gentleness, and tact. The record of Plymouth 
is not quite unstained by persecution, but it is an emi- 
nently good one for the seventeenth century; the cases 
are few and by no means flagrant. 
With the colony of Massachusetts Bay the circum- 
stances were entirely different. That colony was at 
the outset a commercial company, like the great com- 
pany which founded Virginia and afterward had such 
an interesting struggle with James I., ending in the loss 
