the Puritans, who affected not only America but have influenced all the rest of the world.

Tradition has invested the Puritan with certain qualities. There lingers in the mind of every American, the dim recollection of school-days, the picture of the Puritan, grim, forbidding, sombre; and so difficult is it to efface the impressions of youth that Puritanism has become synonymous with all that is harsh and gloomy and opposed to innocent pleasure; and to be Puritanical implies rigidity of conscience and is construed as reproach. To the average American, almost to every American who is not a historical student, Puritan and Pilgrim are interchangeable terms; and so little is the distinction regarded that in a carefully prepared address made by a distinguished public man, himself a writer of American history, delivered at the dedication of a monument to the Pilgrims, he referred to the Puritans as if they and the Pilgrims were one; as if they shared the same views of religion and life; as if to the Pilgrims belonged the honor of having made New England. Acting at the sources of life, instruments otherwise weak became mighty for good or evil, and men, lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as agents of Destiny." In all history there is nothing so extraordinary as the effect of that religious persecution which led to the establishment of Massachusetts and laid the foundation of the great

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1

1 Parkman: Pioneers of France in the New World, Introduction, p. xv.

American Republic. Puritanism left its impress upon the life and thought of England, and having done its work as the agent of Destiny became merged in other forces. Puritanism in America, when it ceased to be merely a religious symbol, was still a social force, and it is to-day. "Vitalized by the principles of its foundation, the Puritan commonwealth grew apace." She sowed the seeds of intolerance and brought forth liberty. She preached blind obedience to authority and was the first to resist when it became galling. She taught thrift and elevated the material to the dignity of a virtue. She made acquisition a duty. She was free, and she was shackled to a narrow and harsh theology that dwarfed expansion. And yet she expanded, sending forth her sons into the barren places, who, full of energy and the love of gain that was as much a part of the Puritan character as his faith in the immutable workings of a higher power, gave new lustre to his name and made the world marvel. Where France failed, England succeeded. What Spain attempted, England accomplished. Holland planted and England reaped. Sweden dreamed and England worked.

In those long years of struggle and adversity, in those years when England was master of a continent and compelled the recognition of her power and Englishmen were competing with each other in the rivalry of trade and in widening their own possessions, those men of the North, inspired by a

great purpose, were building a civilization different from Englishmen in the South, and as the agents of Destiny were unconsciously preparing for the part they were fated to play. Would the American Colonies have severed the tie that bound them to England if Massachusetts had been settled by the men who made Virginia and Maryland There is, of course, no answer, but we can well believe that if there had been no Puritan element in America, if all that we understand by Puritanism had not vitalized the American, the breach might have come possibly it was Destiny, and was inevitable but it would have been closed in another way. But this, however, we do know, that while the men of the South were no less quick to respond to the clarion call that sounded the note of freedom, it was the spirit of the Puritan that pervaded the land; it was Puritanism that made resistance a duty; it was the influence of Puritanism, then as now, that has given the American character its stability, and has ever been an element to counterpoise the sometimes menacing mutability of the infusion of foreign blood; it was the Puritan love of gain and expansion that could be appeased only by new colonies planted in the wilderness; it was the Puritan sense of thrift and order and commerce that made the American people a nation devoted to business and more by the right of birth a nation of shopkeepers using that historical expression in no sense derogatory

but as characterizing the strongest quality of the American mind, its commercial instinct than any other people in the world. There would, I am confident, have been an America if the Puritans had never been driven out of England and found shelter when and how they did, but it would not have been the America we now know.

Such comments as I make from time to time in sketching historical progress are to impress on the reader that almost against their will Englishmen were driven on the road that led to Americanism; that they became Americans without conscious effort, and ceased to be Englishmen, which was foreign to their inclination; and certainly with no conception of the tremendous results that were to follow. Actions in themselves trifling, but which produced momentous psychological consequences, have too often escaped notice. The historian feels that he has more important matters to record, but they are essential in tracing the growth of the mind of a people and observing how they were influenced by causes remote from the climax.

What follows is original in that the results of observation and study develop their own conclusions. It is an effort to search the spring to its source. It is the subjection of phenomena to minute analysis, and although at times there is seemingly no connection between the consequence and its primal cause, in the continuity of thought there

is no break; the present foreshadows the future by the reflection of the past.

Avowing myself to be a uniformitarian, repudiating the doctrine of the catastrophic process of human development, believing that mental growth and social expansion are wrought by slow and gradual change, which is always working to a higher plane, the psychology of the American people presents no miracle and is reducible to exact terms. We have here no unfathomable mystery. There are no wide gaps to be filled by speculative soaring. It is a complex but at the same time compelling study of widening spiritual and mental powers, logical in all its processes; inevitable in its results.

Can the history of a people best be written by one of themselves or by a foreigner? It is a question which every one will answer for himself. My own opinion is that a foreigner who approaches his task with sympathy, who comes not as a critic but as a judicious investigator, who is neither a partisan nor a eulogist, who erects no false standard of comparison, and who is not afflicted with that distressing form of intellectual cecity which measures everything by the narrow vision of its own national perfection, is better qualified for the work. For it is axiomatic that we do not see ourselves as others see us, and what is true of the individual is even in a larger sense true of a people. They see themselves as a man looks at his mirror, who having seen his reflection every day for forty years is still a stranger to his own