bitter and bigoted, hounding on the magistrates to their cruel work, and insulting the unfortunate wretches when they came to suffer. Quaker instinct rightly, no doubt, fixed upon John Norton as the “Fountain and Principal unto whom most of the cruelty and bloodshed is to be imputed.”[48] For the constancy of the Quakers themselves, their endurance and their fortitude, one can feel nothing but admiration. One remembers how, centuries before, men who like them were willing to die rather than to deny their faith had been called the enemies of mankind, and accused of a perverse and execrable superstition. It must be admitted, however, that their behavior was often of a kind that would not be allowed to-day any more than it was then, although it is to be hoped that our modern statecraft would find milder and more efficient means of repression than did our predecessors in New England; yet when one remembers how the Mormons were treated in Illinois and Missouri, and how the mob destroyed a Roman Catholic convent in Massachusetts, within the memories of living men, we may think it perhaps prudent not to be too sweeping in our condemnation. The fundamental difficulty in the Puritans’ position was their illegal and unconstitutional government. To maintain that, they were led to deny to other Englishmen their rights, and to assert an independence of the home authorities which was little short of actual separation. The second evil principle in their government was the union of church and state, or rather the subjection of the state to the church, a church moreover in which the people had no rights except by favor of the ministers, a church that was a close corporation and imbued with the spirit of the law of Moses rather than that of the gospel of Christ. In church, as well as in state, there was a consciousness that their existence was illegal and illegitimate; that, in spite of their protests to the contrary, they had separated from their fellow-Christians in England and had formed a polity for themselves; hence, just as they felt it necessary to manifest their political authority by acts of severity upon any who questioned it, so they deemed it necessary to maintain their orthodoxy by persecuting those who differed from them in religion. They were ill at ease both politically and religiously, and they sought to disguise the fact from themselves, by making proof of all the power that they possessed. Hence it was that the conflict arose which has stained with innocent blood the early history of the land. It is not to be wondered that the Quakers should see, in the horrible death of Endicott and the miserable end of Norton,[49] the hand of an avenging Providence, or that they should believe that for a distance of twenty miles from Boston the ground was cursed so that no wheat could ripen because of a blood-red blight that fastened upon it.[50] But we, who live at a time when we can view the history of the struggle with calmness and impartiality,