But, whether the infant community was a puny bantling or a vigorous brat, I now find myself compelled to admit that its significance, and the secret of its later history down to the time when, in 1644,--a full score of years after the first settlement,--it was swallowed up, and its individuality forever lost, in an all absorbing environment,--the significance, I say, of this later history wholly escaped my observation when I prepared the address of 1874. As I have said, Mr. Nash has, to a certain extent, since made good my deficiencies; I suspect, however, that even yet the riddle is but partially read. To be adequately treated, its treatment should be patient and microscopic. It should be studied in close connection with the course both of foreign events and of events in that subsequent agitation which, rending in twain the nascent commonwealth, permanently influenced the character of Massachusetts. By so doing it also went far towards shaping its destiny. I can now do no more than throw out a few suggestions,--mere hints, perhaps, or possibly surmises,--which it must be for others, members of your Society, to consider, giving them such weight as may properly be their due. To appreciate fully what now here occurred during that formative period between 1630 and 1644, we must revert to the initial fact that Weymouth, or Wessagusset, as it was still called, was the New World centre from which the Gorges movement had gone forth; or, as the founder of Massachusetts would more probably have expressed it, it was the plague spot from which disease might spread. In the parlance now much in vogue among the less scientific, that disease had to be stamped out; and the magistrates of the colony of Massachusetts Bay proceeded to stamp it out. They did, also, a very thorough piece of stamping-out work; but, however thoroughly it may be done, stamping-out is at best a rough and even brutal method of reaching results; and, as a rule, it is the recourse of men of intense and narrow minds,--those who never for an instant doubt that they are right. Whether priest and inquisitor, or minister and magistrate,--fulfilling their mission on Jews in Spain, or Huguenots in France, or Lutherans in Holland, or non-conformists in England, or churchmen in Massachusetts,--they know perfectly that they are engaged in the Lord’s work; and, being engaged in it, they will not hold their hands. Why should they? Are they not God’s chosen implement? Now it is an indisputable fact that every person on the Massachusetts shore connected with that earlier settlement, the old Gorges “planters,” so-called, was soon or late either harried out of the country, or made so uncomfortable in it that he voluntarily withdrew,--in other words, went into exile. Morton of Mount Wollaston, he of May-pole fame, was the first victim. Of Morton it must be admitted little that is good can be said. He was an ungodly roysterer. His trading-post was a public menace as well as a nuisance;