First they had crossed the North Sea and had gone to Holland where they arrived at a moment of great economic depression. Our school-books continue to ascribe their desire for further travel to their unwillingness to let their children learn the Dutch language and otherwise to see them absorbed by the country of their adoption. It seems very unlikely, however, that those simple folk were guilty of such shocking ingratitude and purposely followed a most reprehensible course of hyphenation. The truth is that most of the time they were forced to live in the slums, that they found it very difficult to make a living in an already over-populated country, and that they expected a better revenue from tobacco planting in America than from wool-carding in Leiden. Hence to Virginia they sailed, but having been thrown by adverse currents and bad seamanship upon the shores of Massachusetts, they decided to stay where they were rather than risk the horrors of another voyage in their leaky tub. But although they had now escaped the dangers of drowning and seasickness, they were still in a highly perilous position. Most of them came from small cities in the heart of England and had little aptitude for a life of pioneering. Their communistic ideas were shattered by the cold, their civic enthusiasm was chilled by the endless gales and their wives and children were killed by an absence of decent food. And, finally, the few who survived the first three winters, good-natured people accustomed to the rough and ready tolerance of the home country, were entirely swamped by the arrival of thousands of new colonists who without exception belonged to a sterner and less compromising variety of Puritan faith and who made Massachusetts what it was to remain for several centuries, the Geneva on the Charles River.