A large proportion of the white population everywhere was of Saxon-Teutonic blood. The colonial leaders, and many others, at least in the North, were men who would have been eminent in England itself. Not a few New England theologians and lawyers were peers to the ablest of their time. Numbers of the common people read, reflected, debated. While profoundly religious, the colonists, being nearly all Protestants, were bold and progressive thinkers in every line, prizing discussion, preferring to settle questions by rational methods rather than through authority and tradition. We have observed that there are exceptions to this rule, like the treatment of Roger Williams, but they were exceptions. The colonists possessed in eminent degree energy, determination, power of patient endurance and sacrifice. Their political genius, too, was striking in itself, and it becomes surprising if one compares Germany, in the unspeakable distraction of the Thirty Years' War, with America at the same period, 1618-1648, successfully solving by patience and debate the very problems which were Germany's despair. [Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.] [Illustration: Costume about the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.] In all the southern colonies the English Church was established, a majority of the people its members, its clergy supported by tithes and glebe. William and Mary secured it a sort of establishment also in New York and Maryland. Yet at no moment of the colonial period was there a bishop in America. No church building was consecrated with episcopal rites, no resident of America taken into orders without going to London. [footnote: See, for these facts, The Century for May, 1888.] Even in Virginia, till a very late colonial period, the clergy retained many Puritan forms. Some would not read the Common Prayer. For more than a hundred years the surplice was apparently unknown there, sacraments administered without the proper ornaments and vessels, parts of the liturgy omitted, marriages, baptisms, churchings, and funerals solemnized in private houses. In some parishes, so late as 1724, the communion was partaken sitting. Excellent as were many of the clergymen, there were some who never preached, and not a few even bore an ill name. It was worst in Maryland, and "bad as a Maryland parson" became a proverb. The yearly salary in the best Virginia parishes was tobacco of about 100 pounds value.