They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land. While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each other’s throats. This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its more ferocious Indian neighbors. Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of dissenters. Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate man’s conscience.” And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their ideals before the high court of public opinion.