Mr. Lodge is firmly convinced that the Puritan represents the perfect type of man; that the history of the world began in 1620; that the Puritan derived most of his excellence from being of English blood; and that, while Puritans were Dutch, French, Scotch, and even Irish, the lack of English blood somehow made them incomplete. While the ordinary English Puritan was a wonderful personage, the one who landed in Massachusetts was a genuine marvel, but when he settled around Boston and Nahant, he began to ooze genius and take on wings and halo. To this legend is added, sometimes by direct statement and sometimes by implication, the intelligence that all the great and good things that make this republic different from and superior to other lands are due to the miraculous powers of the Puritan. He is the creator of human freedom, the father of religion, liberty, and tolerance, the founder and originator of free schools, and the reputed author of so many ideas totally at variance with his narrow creed that were he to rise from his bed of clay in New England into the sunlight of to-day, he wouldn’t know himself. This is the school of historical incubation of which Mr. Lodge is the high priest. Mr. Lodge has many admirable qualities; but his mental vision is defective, strabismal, and his ancestral credulity amazing. I am satisfied that Mr. Lodge would not _knowingly_ do an unjust, intolerable, or dishonorable thing; but he is so en-webbed in tradition and so steeped in myth and legend that his rôle of historian is a decided misfit. How else can we account for the absurd theories he has exploited and the conception of historic events he has fathered in literature? Anybody who has even read his history of the _Thirteen Colonies_ will learn that the success achieved in building them up was due to the Puritans; and one is convinced that had some wandering vagabond from Massachusetts been cast away on the coast of Spanish-America, the Latin Republics south of us would now be the model governments of the earth and probably be called “Anglo-Saxon” nations. Everything that makes for success he attributes to the Puritan; and he does it with such a solemn, awe-stricken lack of humor that the irreverent are moved to Homeric mirth. Now, as a matter of fact, the Puritan was a hard and fast bigot, who hated and persecuted everybody who differed from him religiously, and tolerated nobody; he was as priest-ridden as a Scotch Presbyterian, and he set up a system of Church and State that amounted almost to a theocracy. The climate and soil of New England made him a hard worker; his environment and neighbors, a stout fighter; but if his laws and records tell us any story, they say his morals and practices were no better than they ought to have been.