The attempt to erect the moral opinion of a minority into a legal code binding upon all was not, by any means, confined to that section alone at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was, and is, a characteristic of Puritanism wherever found. At the very time that Bradford was condemning the Christmas sports of Plymouth, the authorities in Bermuda, for example, were passing laws requiring that there should be haled to court all “Sabath breakers” who were such “by absenting themselves from church, or leaving during service,” or “by using any bodily recreation by gaminge, sportinge, or by doing any servile work as travelling, fyshinge, cuttinge of wood, digginge of potatoes, carryinge of burdens, beatinge of corne,” together with a long list of other misdemeanors. New England Sabbatarian legislation never went further. Even that petty spying upon one another, to detect sins to be reported to the church, which must have been such an unpleasant form of keeping one's brother in New England, was by no means indigenous there. The “churchwardens and sydesmen,” continued the Bermudian law, “shall dailie observe the carriage and lives of the people, and shall forthwith informe the ministers of all such scandalous crymes as shall be comitted by any of them.”[255] Such quotations from the statute books of the other colonies could be multiplied almost indefinitely. Footnote 255: J. H. Lefroy, _Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlements of the Bermudas_ (London, 1877-79), vol. II, p. 320. The Puritan seed was sown on many soils, and if it took root and flourished so abundantly in New England as there to crowd out the flowers of the field to a greater extent than elsewhere, it was due in part to the nature of the actual soil which the Puritan himself had to till. We have already noted how the geographical features of the region fostered the classes of fishermen, small traders, subsistence farmers, and townsmen; how it prevented the growth of a large land-owning or slave-owning population; how, in a word, it produced a society which was largely democratic and almost wholly middle-class. Moreover, in the discussion of Puritanism, we noticed how that movement was strongest, struck its roots deepest, and assumed its most uncompromising form, in the very class which thus became almost synonymous with the New England population.