The outcome showed, however, that the cruel and immoral power of the clergy and magistrates was coming to be opposed by a growing body of healthy and liberal opinion. The bloody sentence demanded by them had been refused by the people's leaders, and public opinion had finally secured the reversal, within a year, of the milder one that had been executed. The confusion of Gorton's own religious views, and his incoherence in expressing them, could in themselves have won him little popular support.[537] What the people were groping after was the right of the individual to think and act for himself, so long as the state was not endangered, as had been clearly expressed in the Plymouth petition. The road was to be long and bloodstained, but there was now no doubt that the people of Massachusetts intended to travel it, and that their feet were at last set in the right direction. Footnote 537: Most of Gorton's writings are as incoherent as they are vituperative. Age, however, seemed to clear his mind and style, and his letter to Morton, in 1669, defending himself from the charges in the latter's book, was clear and dignified. It is given in Hutchinson, _History_, vol. I, pp. 467 _ff._ By 1640, although new arrivals had not been coming in so rapidly of late, the population of the New England settlements had grown to about eighteen thousand. Moreover, they had, on the whole, been prosperous. We have already seen how even Plymouth, with its slender resources, its poor soil, and its ill-chosen site, had yet achieved more than economic independence, and we have noted the financial resources of New Haven. The capital and numbers of Massachusetts were, of course, far larger than those of either of the others, and it was estimated that that colony had spent, in its first dozen years, nearly £200,000, or in our day, perhaps, five million dollars, in making its settlement.[538] Possessed of the unrestricted resources of a continent, and having suffered no losses from Indians or foreign foe, New England was apparently in a sound economic condition, when suddenly the crash came. “Merchants would sell no wares but for ready money,” Winthrop wrote in 1640; “men could not pay their debts though they had enough, prices of lands and cattle fell soon to the one-half, yea to a third, and after one-fourth part.”[539] The Massachusetts General Court was soon called upon to pass special legislation to assist debtors, as the suffering became general. Footnote 538: Jeremiah Dummer, _A Defence of the New England Charters_ (London, 1721), p. 9. Footnote 539: J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. II, p. 21; _cf._ also pp. 8, 29, 37.