The leaders of the migration were substantial and hard-headed laymen like Winthrop and Dudley, and able and conscientious clergymen such as Cotton, Norton and Wilson, Davenport, Thomas Hooker, and Richard Mather. During the eclipse of Parliament and the Country party in England, the former found many avenues of advancement closed, while their estates, even when carefully husbanded, would no longer permit them, as Winthrop said, to "keep sail with their equals." The latter, excluded by their Puritan and evangelical convictions from the profession for which they were trained, turned to America as the most inviting field for service among the elect of God. They were men of ability and conviction--"a chosen company of men, picked out ... by no human contrivance, but by a strange contrivance of God," to be the leaders of a chosen people. Yet the Puritan colony was not made up of leaders. In firm intelligence, in clearly realized conceptions of Church and State, in moral fervor and spiritual exaltation, men like Winthrop and Davenport were far removed from the rank and file. The great majority of those who first came to Massachusetts were small "merchants, husbandmen, and artificers"; men with little property or none at all; uneducated and home-keeping men whose outlook was bounded by the parish; Puritans by temperament and habit rather than by reasoned conviction: followers in a very real and literal sense. Few of them would have come as individuals; but they came as families and groups of families from the same community, yielding to the call of a favorite minister or trusted neighbor. And few would have come for religion's sake alone. Persecution was the efficient cause, but straitened circumstances frequently gave point to the pricks of conscience. Even Winthrop himself, a man of substantial possessions, tells us that a consideration for his undertaking the New World venture was that "his meanes heer are soe shortened as he shall not be able to continue in that place and employment where he now is." How far more persuasive an appeal was this to common folk! "This lande grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a horse or sheep. All towns complain of the burthen of their poore though we have taken up many unnecessary, yea unlawfull trades to maintaine them. Children, servants, and neighbors (especially if they be poore) are considered the greatest burthen. We stand heer striving for places of habitation (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement."