The Pilgrim governors were at least all honest, and virtuous, and true; and they would have pleased those Thebans who made the statues of their judges without hands, importing that they were no takers, for these men too were guiltless of handling bribes. God blessed colonial New England rarely when he sent her such men as a benediction. But they are gone—Bradford, and Winthrop, and Carver, and Dudley, and Vane, and Endicott. ——“Woe the day! How mingles mightiest dust with meanest clay.” CHAPTER XXXII. EUREKA. “Like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at far distance, true colors and shapes.” MILTON, _History of England_. When Great Britain, looking through the eyes of the Long Parliament in 1641, glanced across the Atlantic, she was surprised to see that the despised bantling of 1620 had, against all discouragements, staggered to its feet, and stood a nation, self-sustaining, robust, independent. Already twenty-one thousand Pilgrims were permanently seated in New England;[1048] fifty prosperous villages[1049] peeped from the openings in the long unbroken forests. The steeples of forty churches pointed their white fingers to the sky.[1050] The rude log-cabins of the first months of settlement had been replaced by well-built houses.[1051] Agriculture climbed the hill-sides. Commerce played by the sea-shore. Trade laughed and chaffed and dickered in the market-place. The spindle and the loom nodded merrily to each other over their work, as they labored side by side in the fabrication of “cotton and woollen and linen cloth;” for manufactures were even thus early established in New England.[1052] And the Pilgrims had a foreign influence. When a Madeira merchant visited Boston in 1642, he told Winthrop that the West Indian Jesuits taught that the “New-Englanders were the worst of all heretics, and that they were the cause of the civil war in the British island, and of the downfall of Archbishop Laud.”[1053]