SAIL AND THE STREAM 281 



lution. Spain had failed in the west because she imposed an 

 absolutist control over her colonies. France under Colbert, in 

 spite of a military build-up at sea, failed because she either 

 would not or could not export her population to the west. 

 England, in spite of an increasingly jealous and shortsighted 

 policy, won out for the time being in the west because her 

 working people and skilled artisans brought with them the 

 backbone of European culture and gave it fresh impulse and 

 development without the constant interference of the home 

 government or a state church. 



But along with this commercial growth — as is always true 

 in any period of intense and energetic development — both 

 political and religious thought also developed with increasing 

 vigor. In Massachusetts the Congregational system of church 

 government laid the foundation for town meetings and the 

 basic democracy of small communities. In Rhode Island Roger 

 Williams demonstrated the possibilities of political and 

 religious liberty, for in himself he represented the best of the 

 new impulse stirring in England. He was a close friend of 

 Milton and Sir Harry Vane. It is worth noting that Vane as 

 a young man got his training in Massachusetts, and was 

 appointed governor there at the age of twenty-four; later in 

 England he came to the aid of Parliament, and administered 

 the Royal Navy. These men helped mold the earliest New 

 England tradition. Pastor Robinson of the Pilgrims had 

 expressed this clearly when he said, ''We are not over one 

 another but with one another." A Connecticut preacher had 

 declared as early as 1638: 'The choice of the public magis- 

 trates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance''; 

 and the pattern of the Connecticut system was largely adopted 

 later as a model for the Federal Constitution. 



On both sides of the Atlantic world a new spirit bred from 

 the release of energy and from the new horizons of human 

 expansion due to the westward opening opportunity marked 



