In one grand point the pre-eminent merit of the Puritans must be acknowledged: they strove earnestly and conscientiously for what they held to be the truth. For this they endured with unshaken constancy, and persecuted with unremitting zeal. The suicidal policy of the Stuarts had, for a time, driven all the upholders of civil liberty into the ranks of sectarianism. The advocates of the extremes of religious and political opinion flocked to America, the furthest point from kings and prelates that they could conveniently reach. Ingrafted on the stubborn temper of the Englishman, and planted in the genial soil of the West, the love of this civil and religious liberty grew up with a vigor that time only served to strengthen; that the might of armies vainly strove to overcome. Thus, ultimately, the persecution under the Stuarts was the most powerful cause ever yet employed toward the liberation of man in his path through earth to heaven. For many years England generally refrained from interference with her American colonies in matters of local government or in religion. They taxed themselves, made their own laws, and enjoyed religious freedom in their own way. In one state only, in Virginia, was the Church of England established, and even there it was accorded very little help by the temporal authority: in a short time it ceased to receive the support of a majority of the settlers, and rapidly decayed. On one point, however, the mother country claimed and exacted the obedience of the colonists to the imperial law. In her commercial code she would not permit the slightest relaxation in their favor, whatever the peculiar circumstances of their condition might be. This short-sighted and unjust restriction was borne, partly because it could not be resisted, and partly because at that early time the practical evil was but lightly felt. Although the principle of representation was seldom specified in the earlier charters, the colonists in all cases assumed it as a matter of right: they held that their privileges as Englishmen accompanied them wherever they went, and this was generally admitted as a principle of colonial policy. In the seventeenth century England adopted the system of transportation to the American colonies. The felons were, however, too limited in numbers to make any serious inroad upon the morals or tranquillity of the settlers. Many of the convicts were men sentenced for political crimes, but free from any social taint; the laboring population, therefore, did not regard them with contempt, nor shrink from their society. It may be held, therefore, that this partial and peculiar system of transportation introduced no distinct element into the constitution of the American nation.