238 



kind, dictates. The whole is left, without let, hindrance, sug- 

 gestion or influence from any other quarter, to the people on 

 the spot. They acknowledge no subjection, and none is at- 

 tempted. They are a select people for the work — intelligent, 

 thoughtful, brave and devout. They are settled in families, and 

 comprise all the elements of a State. Although emigrants 

 from the old world, they trail none of its outgrown and arbitra- 

 ry institutions after them. Although conversant with all the 

 learning of ancient and of feudal forms of government, they ap- 

 ply none of them here. Having a new world to occupy, they 

 resolve to establish nothing but what their own experience 

 proves to be salutary and desirable. Oglethorpe planned a so- 

 cial state for Georgia ; John Locke drafted a scheme of govern- 

 ment for the Carolinas ; Lord Baltimore superintended Mary- 

 land ; William Penn, Pennsylvania ; and other proprietors and 

 patroons, their several colonies and settlements ; but not so in 

 Massachusetts. The careful, considerate, and truly indepen- 

 dent founders of our State, were guided by no distant light. — 

 They moved only as the facts and circumstances of their own 

 actual condition opened the way, felt every step as they ad- 

 vanced, followed no theories, indulged in no speculations, held 

 fast only what was found to be good, and thus accomplished the 

 great end of a stable, prosperous, powerful, and permanent so- 

 cial and civil organization. 



During the half century which these Records cover, the work 

 was gradually, cautiously and securely done. The growth was 

 natural, and the matured result as complete as is that of every 

 natural growth. But, unlike the maturity of the growth of na- 

 ture in other things, there was in this no element of decay. The 

 institutions worked out, under the first charter of Massachu- 

 setts, have withstood a century of immediately subsequent col- 

 onial endurances ; and as another century of prosperous self- 

 government, under the flag of our great Union, is approaching 

 its completion, we feel that they are growing stronger and more 

 firmly rooted every day. We are impressed with a continually 

 deepening conviction that our fathers laid a foundation that can 

 never be moved, and that it is owing to them that we are ena- 

 bled to claim, in education, arts, wealth and power, a rank sec- 

 ond to none in this Republic. 



These records are, therefore, for this reason, invaluable, be- 

 cause they exhibit, with a clearness and completeness no where 

 else to be equalled, the origin and progressive formation of a 

 FREE COMMONWEALTH. It is the ouly one of the kind in all 



