Yet with whatever semblance the older settlements might take on the character of European civilization, America was bound to be the land of opportunity so long as there was abundance of free land to entice the ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men, accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward along the rivers into Maine and New Hampshire, or beyond the original Connecticut settlements into the valley of the Housatonic. Here land was less often than formerly disposed of to groups of proprietors intent to maintain the traditions of town and church; acquired by the older towns or by land agents, it was more often sold to companies or to individuals for the profit it would bring. The famous New Hampshire grants, one hundred and thirty townships in the present State of Vermont, fell mainly to speculators who sold to the highest bidder, covenanted and uncovenanted alike, among the throng of home-seekers who pushed into this western country in the seventh decade of the century. Long before the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of pioneer settlements--such as Vassalboro and Durham on the Androscoggin and the Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic--which formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old, where class distinctions were little known, where contact with the Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.