cat-of-nine-tails so severely that blood was drawn by the very first stroke; and George Wilson, “in cruel irons that rotted his flesh, and long imprisonment, departed this life for his testimony to the Lord.”[44] In Maryland they were subjected to fine and imprisonment for refusing to take an oath or to serve in the militia. Liberty of conscience was granted in 1688.[45] It was in New England, and especially in Massachusetts, that the persecution was general and severe. The magistrates, as a rule, defended their action, as necessary to the maintenance of their authority and to the preservation of order and orthodoxy; and their conduct has been extenuated and excused, if not actually defended, by modern New England historians. It is not a pleasant history, but there is something to be said upon the side of the authorities even by one who has no admiration for them or sympathy with them. The Puritans had not come to New England for liberty of thought, but for liberty of action. Having failed, as they thought at the time, to secure the triumph of their views in the church and state of England, they preferred to leave the struggle and come to New England, where they could live under their own system without being obliged to contend or suffer for their faith--a point upon which the Quaker controversialists make some very sharp remarks.[46] They considered the territory which they held to be their own _peculium_, and claimed that by their charter they had acquired absolute sovereignty in its limits, subject to no appeal to England; and they realized that if appeal to England was granted, their absolute authority was at an end. One of the leading colonists is reported to have said: “If we admit appeal to the Parliament this year, next year they will send to see how it is, and the third year the government will be changed.” The settlement also had in their eyes a religious character; it was founded, as they boasted, for religion and not for trade, and they held that they had a right to dictate the religious usages and practices therein, as was shown by their treatment of Mrs. Hutchinson and Wheelwright, Roger Williams and Gorton, Child and Maverick, not to mention Morton of Merry Mount. They believed the Quakers to be a pernicious sect, confounding them with other fanatical bodies which they resembled, and they feared that the natural consequence of the claim which they made to immediate revelation would be communistic attempts at the overthrow of the established order, such as had been seen a hundred years before in Germany. From these premises the conclusion was a natural one, that their duty was to nip the evil in the bud, to crush the Quakers before they became strong enough to be dangerous to the state. Their action in banishing the first that arrived, before any overt acts were committed, was undoubtedly technically illegal; but if the Quakers had been in reality what they fancied them, no one would have blamed them for their prompt decision.