The English Pilgrims who came from Norwich and Plymouth, the Hollanders who came from Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the Huguenots who came from La Rochelle and Rouen were distinctly not tree-dwellers nor troglodytes. They were people who had the habits and preferences of a well-ordered life in cities of habitation, where the current of existence was tranquil and regular except when disturbed by the storms of war or religious persecution. And those who came from the country districts, from the little villages of Normandy and Poitou and Languedoc, of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Cornwall, of Friesland and Utrecht, of the Rhenish Palatinate, and of the north of Ireland, were not soldiers of fortune and adventurers. They were for the most part peaceable farmers, whose ideal of earthly felicity was the well-filled barn and the comfortable fireside. There were people of a different sort, of course, among the settlers of America. England sent a good many of her bankrupts, incurable idlers, masterless men, sons of Belial, across the ocean in the early days. Some writers say that she sent as many as 50,000 of them. Among the immigrants of other nations there were doubtless many "who left their country for their country's good." It is silly to indulge in illusions in regard to the angelic purity and unmixed virtue of the original American stock. But the elements of turbulence and disorder were always, and are still, in the minority. Whatever interruption they caused in the development of a civilized and decent life was local and transient. The steady sentiment of the people who were in control was in favour of common order and social coöperation. There is a significant passage in the diary of John Adams, written just after the outbreak of mob violence against the loyalists in 1775. A man had stopped him, as he was riding along the highway, to congratulate him on the fury which the patriots and their congress had stirred up, and the general dissolution of the bonds of order. "Oh, Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues done for us. We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there will never be another." Upon which the indignant Adams comments: "Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to myself, for I rode along without any answer to this wretch; are these the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in this country? Half the nation for what I know: for half the nation are debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the sentiments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, our health, and everything else?"