The enlightened historian of the present day,[2] reviewing the past in the calm spirit of philosophy and Christianity, speaks thus: “The spirit of the institutions established by this band of voluntary exiles—for the number was considerable which followed this noble woman into banishment—on the soil which they owed to the benevolence of the native, was derived from natural justice: by a social compact, signed by all, the government was based on the general consent; the forms of administration were borrowed from the Jews. Coddington was elected judge, and three elders were chosen assistants. The colony rested on the principle of intellectual liberty. The settlement prospered, and in 1641 its constitution was framed. It was ordained therefore by the whole body of freemen, ‘that the government be a democracy, or popular government, viz., It is in the power of the body of freemen orderly assembled, or the major part of them, to make or constitute just laws by which they will be regulated, and to depute from among themselves such ministers as will see them faithfully executed between man and man.’ It was further ordained that _none be accounted a delinquent for doctrine_. The little community was held together by affection and freedom of opinion. The seal of the state was a sheaf of arrows, and the motto AMOR VINCIT OMNIA. The same year a patent was obtained from England through their friend, the now powerful Henry Vane.” John Wheelwright, with other of Anne Hutchinson’s disciples, went to the north, where he purchased, in the valley of the Piscataqua, a tract of land from a celebrated Indian sorcerer, the chief of the Pennicook Indians, and founded the town of Exeter. Of the remarkable woman, the head of this intellectual movement, which still survives in America, we have but little to relate, and that is sad as the last act of a tragedy. Leaving the state from which she was thrust out, she travelled by land through the wilderness to Providence, and thence joined her family and friends on their island settlement. Banishment had not, however, destroyed her influence in Massachusetts; she continued to draw after her such numbers that the wise men of Massachusetts suspected her of witchcraft. Her son and her son-in-law, both preachers, who had been in Barbadoes, returning thence to Boston, were heavily fined and imprisoned for preaching. Anne Hutchinson was now a widow, and as not even Rhode Island seemed a refuge from persecution, she and her family, the following year, removed still further south, to the borders of the Dutch settlements. Unfortunately, the Indians were at that time in a state of exasperation against the Dutch, and not discriminating between nations, set fire to the house of Anne Hutchinson, and, sorrowful to relate, she and all her family, with the exception of one child, sixteen persons in number, perished at midnight either by the flames or the cruel weapons of the Indians.