The Puritan, guided by the hand of God, planted his future abode on the shores of New England, a land truly congenial to him, whose whole mental and physical life had hitherto been one of storm and tempest. Nor could a fitter type in the human race have been found than he to tame the rock-crowned hills, to brave the rigors of such winters as Old England never knew, and the lurking dangers at the hands of a powerful and jealous race. Here was no place for indolence and luxurious ease. Only by the most persevering and painful labors could the bleak hills and gorge-like valleys be made to yield the fruits of life. Only by unremitting energy and the most patient self-denial could starvation be kept from his door, while constant watchfulness and never-flinching courage were required to ward off the many dangers that beset his path. Nature herself seemed pitted against him to contest every inch of his progress. But his nature was as stern and rough as that of the land he had come to tame. Accustomed to move steadily on in the pursuit of some one great purpose, to surmount every obstacle and crush every impediment, looking neither to the right nor the left, nor even pausing to pluck the flowrets that bloomed by the wayside, there was for him no such word as fail. Here the unbounded resources and exhaustless energy of body and mind found fitting scope. What to ordinary men would seem but hopeless, cheerless toil, was to him but pastime. The Puritan was just the man for New England, and New England the land for the Puritan. How he succeeded let all Christendom proclaim, for his works were not for himself nor his immediate posterity, but for the whole world. But it is not so much with the results of his labors that we have to do as with their effects upon himself and his posterity. Here, as in the case of the Cavalier, every circumstance of his life tended to aggravate the hereditary peculiarities of his class. The success of his enterprise, the crowning of those hopes which had led him to cast off all ties of the old world, the lofty spirit which induced him to reject all external aid, and, above all, the crisp, free mountain air he breathed, begot in him a feeling of independence and superiority, and, at the same time, ideas of social equality, which have made themselves manifest to all time. Where all were toilful laborers, and few possessed more than a sufficiency of worldly goods to provide for the necessities of the day, there was no room for the distinctions of rank. Power, with them, resided in the masses; the results of their labor were common stock; their interests were one and the same. Add to these facts their ancient hatred of the aristocracy, and we have the influences Under which New England has ever tended to republicanism. The Puritan race has ever been republican to the core, and this is one great and vital respect in which they have continually diverged from their Southern brethren.