as such. He has learned from recent historians to distrust any
such facile classification of the first colonists. He knows by
this time that there were aristocrats in Massachusetts and
commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more
tolerant than the Puritans of Boston, and that Rhode Island was
more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general
statements may be, the interpreter of men of letters must always
go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual
person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of
creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of
the race each thinking person becomes a species by himself.

While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial
instincts and traditions of the first colonists were
overwhelmingly English, and that their political and ethical
views were the product of a turbulent and distraught time, it is
even more important to note how the physical situation of the
colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well as their
political problems. Among the emigrants from England, as we have
seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious
opinion, individual motive. But at least they all possessed the
physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous
voyage, the fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the
new life. To go out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was
to meet triumphantly a searching test. It was in truth a
"sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had the courage
to go into exile while a few saints may have been deterred, it is
a truism to say that the pioneers were made up of brave men and
braver women.