There is the framework of their polity; its sure foundation that they were “straitly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole by everyone; and so mutually”—the bedrock requirement for the successful working of any coöperative scheme. There was no playing of favorites: each man worked; each man, if for no more than his own sake, must work with good-will. “The people,” Robinson had written of them, “are for the body of them industrious and frugal, we think we may safely say, as any company of people in the world.” He knew intimately the men of whom he spoke. They were “common people” as compared with some of the aristocrats of Massachusetts Bay; yet on the Mayflower roster appeared “masters,” “servants,” and “artisans”; and each in his degree contributed to the public welfare. Action they constantly matched up with their professed attitude to God, with the result that if the expression of their belief were of an ancient pattern, the practice of it would stand well with the liberalism of to-day. The first year of the little colony was difficult enough, and before the winter was over they might have starved had it not been for the fisheries and the kindness of their Indian neighbors. Yet of their neighbors’ good-will they were not too confident, and they levelled the graves of their dead lest the number should be known to the Indians, and for the discouragement of prospective colonists. Before the spring was over, one half of the one hundred and two souls that sailed by the Mayflower had died, and of the eighteen women only four survived the hardships of the first six months. Yet they would not lose heart. “It is not with us as with other men whom small things can discourage or small discontentments cause to wish themselves home again,” William Brewster and John Robinson had declared. “If we should be driven to return, we should not hope to recover our present helps and comforts, neither indeed look ever for ourselves to attain unto the like in any other place during our lives.” Wherein one may read how bitter had been the years of their exile, how constant their longing for freedom and the abiding comfort of justice. They meant now to hold on and succeed, and if possible to encourage others to join them, in the place where their own courage and initiative had set them; for it seems to have been a fact that the Pilgrims displayed not only indomitable spirit in their optimistic reports to correspondents in the old country, but also the considered policy of shrewd men who would enlist recruits for their enterprise. Even their critic, John Smith, was moved to admiration for these men who, to be sure, had invited trouble by “accident, ignorance, and wilfulness,” yet “have endured, with a wonderful patience many losses and extremities.” And he marvels that “they subsist and prosper so well, not any of them will abandon the country, but to the utmost of their powers increase their numbers.”