HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. 



queer and petty principles, who were such crooked sticks 

 by nature that they could not lie still even there. Plym- 

 outh, badly situated both for commerce and culture, with 

 no good harbor on her coast, and with her thin and sandy 

 soil, had been able, even with the best efforts of her noble 

 men, to move but very slowly forward in the path of em- 

 pire. While, from the fact that her teachers were taken 

 from her repeatedly by the superior attractions offered by 

 wealthier neighbors, she had been compelled to occupy a 

 lower place in the relative scale, than that to which she 

 would have been entitled from the purity and worth of her 

 founders, and her general patient industry. Massachusetts 

 had advanced more rapidly. Every thing helped her, until 

 she was strong, not merely relatively as compared with 

 her neighbors, but as looked at from the mother-country 

 across the sea. Connecticut, too, was thriving. She had 

 plenty of good land, wise and thrifty oversight, and gen- 

 eral prosperity. 



Dr. Palfrey draws the picture of daily life with a skilful 

 pencil; thus: — 



" In the three associated Colonies, there is great similarity in the 

 ordinary occupations and pursuits. Most adults of both sexes work 

 hard, and nearly all the children go to school. The greater part of the 

 men get a living by farm labor : they provide bread and meat, milk, 

 butter and cheese, for their own tables, and raise stock to sell in the 

 West Indies for money with which to buy foreign commodities. But 

 they are not all farmers. A portion are lumberers, plying the axe 



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