Both in a spiritual and a material sense, it was to preserve and not to dissolve the ties of community life that the Puritans, leaders and followers alike, came to Massachusetts. Coming as townsmen seeking land, they settled in towns, to which they often gave the names of the places from which they came--for example, Boston, Plymouth, Dorchester. The town was not originally an industrial center, but a group of agricultural proprietors who procured from the company title to the land which they held individually or in common according to custom, and which they cultivated after the manner with which they were familiar. Free and equal access to the soil was the principle upon which the original grants were made: there were no quit-rents or charges; the allotments were small, and so far as possible equal in value. And happily the ideals of the settlers were suited to the environment in which they found themselves. The soil was adapted to the raising of a variety of farm products; corn and fodder and vegetables, swine and cattle and horses; products requiring neither great estates nor servile labor for profitable cultivation. Thus in New England the unit of settlement was a group of small, free proprietors living together in villages and managing their affairs by concerted action. The town and the town meeting were as natural to New England as the plantation and the county were to Virginia and the other Southern colonies. But the community in New England was a spiritual as well as an industrial enterprise, and the counterpart of the town was the church. By the leaders especially, settlement was regarded more as a planting of churches than as the founding of towns. In their view the church covenant was the expression of the fundamental social pact, the public confession of membership in the spiritual City of God, the very basis of "that Church-State," that "due form of Government both civil and ecclesiastical," which they had come to the New World to establish. "We covenant with our Lord and with one another"--so runs the Salem covenant, which may be taken as typical--"we avouch the Lord to be our God, and ourselves to be his people, in the truth and simplicity of our spirits. We promise to walk with our brethren, with all watchfulness and tenderness, avoiding jealousy and suspicion, back-bitings, censurings, provokings, secret risings of spirit against them; but in all offenses to follow the rule of our Lord Jesus, and to bear and forbear, give and forgive, as he hath taught us. We do hereby promise to carry ourselves in all lawful obedience to those that are over us, in church and commonwealth. We resolve to approve ourselves to the Lord in our particular callings; shunning idleness as the bane of any state; nor will we deal hardly or oppressingly with any, wherein we are the Lord's stewards."