On the other hand, again, as tending unduly to swell the estimated number of Puritans, it must be remembered that the great landlords possessed the gift of many livings, and if one of them, from any motive whatever, turned Puritan, all of his livings could be bestowed upon Puritan clergy, and the congregations would be nominally counted as Puritan. For example, to cite by no means the most influential of a group which included such men as the Earl of Warwick, we may note that Sir Robert Jermyn controlled ten livings in one archdeaconry, while nine other laymen controlled sixty-five more.[167] Thus these ten men—chosen somewhat at random—owned seventy-five livings; and, upon their declaring themselves Puritans, not only would seventy-five clergy have to become Puritans, to be acceptable, but, if we place their congregations as low as two hundred each, we would have fifteen thousand laity thus attending Puritan churches as a result of the religious or other motives which had moved ten landlords to number themselves with the Saints. This indicates how impossible it is to calculate the number of Puritans who were such by sincere conviction. Footnote 167: _Ibid._, p. 270. As to the learning of the Puritan clergy, the latest researches also fail to bear out the earlier controversial claims on their behalf. Of the two hundred and eighty-one men whose names are known, one hundred and seventy-six had no university degree, while of the remainder, only thirty-one were higher than Masters of Arts.[168] There were, indeed, Puritan divines eminent for learning, but the proportion of university men among them was no higher than is known to have been the case among the Conformists. Footnote 168: Usher, _Reconstruction_, vol. I, p. 251. Hence the Puritans were but a small minority, both of the clergy and of the laity. The instinct of fair play, which leads a man to side with the under-dog, without stopping to consider whether the upper-dog may be not only upper, but justified, induces us to lay great stress on the rights of minorities, on the theory that a majority can take care of itself. Minorities, however, are usually vocal, organized, and zealous, while the majority is dumb, unwieldy, and but little inclined constantly to resist the attacks of all the various minorities in the field. If there is reason to condemn the Church in England for requiring the Puritan minority to conform, then the Puritans themselves must be condemned just as strictly for their oppression of the minorities in New England. There cannot be two canons of judgment for the same act; and, in fact, as we shall see later, the Puritans there in power were, if anything, the more guilty of the two.