And, indeed, the main basis of distinction in this new world was a purely external one--the possession of wealth; and wealth was in no unreal sense the bequest of nature to capacity. Initiative and industry, rather than the dead hand of custom, marked a man for distinction and preferment. It was the land of opportunity where the servant could become the farmer, the farmer a planter, where the planter, acquiring by skill or happy chance a great estate, thereby entered in with the political and social grandees. There were classes but no castes; not birth or title, but individual enterprise determined rank and influence. And in an undeveloped country the possession of a great estate was not a social grievance, but an evidence of success in the perennial contest with nature, the measure of personal prowess and a test of civic virtue. The enrichment of Colonel Byrd, even by ways that were devious, was viewed with complacence by his neighbors so long as it harmed them not. Yet the submission of the small to the great planter was a convenience rather than a necessity. The wilderness, with the Indian as a part of it, developed a crude and a ruthless spirit, but never a cringing or a submissive one. The gentleman and the magistrate were deferred to, but neither was regarded as sacrosanct; and when, in the regime of Berkeley, special privilege in alliance with official corruption seemed to be narrowing the chances of the common man, the insurgent spirit of frontier democracy, denying the validity of distinctions and demanding fair play, found militant expression in Bacon's Rebellion. The episode was an early instance of that struggle between rich and poor, between exploiter and exploited, of that stubborn insistence upon equal opportunity which have so often characterized the more decisive periods of American history. II The origin of New England is inseparably connected with the Protestant Reformation, that many-sided movement of which no formula is adequate to convey the full meaning. From one point of view it was the nationalization of the Church, the subjection of the ecclesiastical to the lay power. In the end the principle of territorial sovereignty everywhere prevailed, in Catholic no less than in Protestant countries: whether Lutheran or Gallican or Anglican, whether completely separated from Rome or retaining a spiritual communion with it, the Church submitted to the principle of _cujus regio ejus religio_, and became an instrument in the hands of kings for erecting the lay and territorial absolutism on the ruins of the universal church-state. James I spoke for all his kind when he cried out, "No Bishop no King!" The lay prince wished not to destroy the Church, but to use it; the sum of his purpose was to transfer the ultimate authority in conduct and thought from the divinely appointed priest to the divinely appointed king.