_John Winthrop._--In the early spring of 1630, a fleet of four vessels sailed out into the sea from a beautiful harbour in the Isle of Wight, their prows pointed westward. On board that fleet were the greatest company of wealthy and cultivated persons that have ever emigrated in any one voyage from England to America. They were prosperous English Puritans. Foremost among them in intellectual power and in weight of character was John Winthrop, already chosen Governor of the Massachusetts Company, and qualified by every personal trait to be the conductor and the statesman of the new Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay. Immediately upon going on board ship he began a piece of writing, which he continued to work at not only during the rest of the voyage but during the rest of his life, and which is a treasure beyond price among our early historic memorials,--_The History of New England_. His plan was to jot down significant experiences in the daily life of his company, not only while at sea but after their arrival in America. For almost twenty years the story went forward, from 1630 until a few weeks before the writer’s death in 1649. It is quite evident that Winthrop wrote what he did with the full purpose of having it published as a history; but he wrote it amid the hurry and weariness of his unloitering life, with no anxiety about style, with no other purpose than to tell the truth in plain and honest fashion. There is one portion of this History that has acquired great celebrity: it is the one embodying Winthrop’s speech, in 1645, in the general court, on his being acquitted of the charge of having exceeded his authority as deputy-governor. One passage of it, containing Winthrop’s statement of the nature of liberty, is of pre-eminent merit, worthy of being placed by the side of the weightiest and most magnanimous sentences of John Locke or Algernon Sidney. A distinguished American publicist has declared that this is the best definition of liberty in the English language, and that in comparison with it what Blackstone says about liberty seems puerile.[1]