And yet, notwithstanding these economic disadvantages, this depletion of a population inheriting noble ideals, and the infusion of a class of settlers holding, in many instances, political and religious convictions quite at variance with those of the founders of the colonies, the “type” persists. The New England towns are still unlike, and in some respects superior to, those of other sections of the country. The New England States still lead in reformatory legislation. New England’s approval or disapproval of ideas affecting national destiny still has weight with Congress and Presidents altogether disproportionate to the number of her representatives in Congress or her votes in the Electoral College. If one will walk about New England towns one will find in each a church, a town-house, and a school, and in most of them a railroad station and a factory. In the majority of them there will also be a public library, small perhaps and usually housed in the town-house, but open to all, and supported from the public funds. In the larger towns, especially in those where manufacturing is a prominent factor in the communal prosperity, a hospital, supported by public taxation, is open to all. In almost every town there is a grass-covered, tree-shaded “common,” which serves as a village or town park, and on it usually stand memorial tablets or statues testifying to the valor of the dead who went forth to fight in the War of the Revolution or in the Civil War. The church symbolizes that belief in God and that disposition to obey His will and law which the noblest and wisest men of all ages and climes have agreed upon as the _sine qua non_ of civic as well as of individual prosperity, and in this instance it also stands for that separation of Church and State which our national experience--and that of Canada and the Australian Colonies as well--shows to be the ideal relation. That for a time, in the early days of Massachusetts and Connecticut, there was an unsuccessful attempt to preserve a union of State and Church, an attempt which had for some of its least commendable incidents the wholesale hanging of men and women for witchcraft, the expulsion of Quakers, and the ostracism or exclusion of Roman Catholics and Anglicans, is not to be denied. That the people of New England have been duly conscientious is apparent by the multiplication of churches at home, and by their never-ceasing, overflowing gifts to establish churches, colleges, schools, and Christian missions in the South and West and in foreign lands. It is from the thrifty, prosperous, philanthropic New Englander that the treasuries of the great Protestant missionary and educational societies receive their largest average per-capita gifts, and it is to New England that the steps of the Western and Southern educator still turn for endowments which his State may not, or the people cannot, or do not, give.