The problems of government in the new country soon came thick upon the little group from the opposition in the old. The notorious Morton, for example, was once more singing and trading in “his old nest in the Massachusetts,” in the autumn of the year in which Winthrop landed. There were valid reasons, notably his selling fire-arms to the Indians, which might have served adequately as warrant for his arrest by the authorities; but when that action was decided upon, the alleged grounds bore a curiously trumped-up appearance. In the official order for his apprehension, no crime was mentioned; and in his sentence the only matters cited were the “many wrongs he hath done” the Indians, and the theft of a canoe from them.[348] Whatever the moral nature of his intercourse with the natives, it was not likely that, from their standpoint, there had been any very serious crime committed against them by a man living almost isolated in their midst, and whose sole business was trading with them. The convenient, but apparently unfounded, suspicions of a murder committed by him in England, and a warrant procured from the Chief Justice for his shipment thither, could not have served as a basis for any sentence inflicted in Massachusetts.[349] The probable truth is that the Puritans either wanted to teach the discontented “old planters” a lesson, for which purpose Morton offered himself as an easy victim, or they suspected, what was indeed the fact, that he was in communication with Gorges.[350] Obviously, neither of these could be openly alleged as a cause for the punishment they inflicted, which was extraordinarily severe. He was put in the stocks and deported to England; his entire property was confiscated, and his house burned to the ground. Set at liberty in England with little delay, he got into communication with Gorges, and was soon joined by two other victims of colonial methods. Footnote 348: _Massachusetts Records_, vol. I, pp. 74 _f._ Footnote 349: Bradford, _Plymouth_, p. 253. Footnote 350: C. F. Adams, _New English Canaan of Thomas Morton_ (Prince Soc., Boston, 1883), p. 41. For a fair and full account, _cf._ the same author's _Three Episodes_, vol. I, pp. 240-50. Morton's own account is in his _New English Canaan_, pp. 108 _ff._