view, of uncommon wisdom; understand medical science, politics, and
religion, better than those, who have studied them through life."
These restless men, with nothing to lose, who were delighted with
innovation, were, in his judgment, of the type that had ruined
Greece and Rome. "In mercy, therefore," exclaimed Dwight, "to the
sober, industrious, and well-disposed inhabitants, Providence has
opened in the vast western wilderness a retreat, sufficiently
alluring to draw them away from the land of their nativity. We have
many troubles even now; but we should have many more, if this body
of foresters had remained at home." [Footnote: Dwight, Travels, II.,
458-463.]

Perhaps the most striking feature of New England life was its
organization into communities. What impressed the traveler from
other sections or from the Old World was partly the small farms,
divided into petty fields by stone fences, but, above all, "the
clustering of habitations in villages instead of dispersing them at
intervals of a mile over the country." The spires of the white
churches of separate hamlets dotted the landscape. Simple comfort
and thrift were characteristic of the region. "Here," wrote a
Virginia planter, traveling in New England in the early thirties,
"is not apparent a hundredth part of the abject squalid poverty that
our State presents." [Footnote: "Minor's Journal," in Atlantic
Monthly, XXVI., 333.]

The morale of New England was distinctive. Puritanism had founded
the section, and two centuries of Calvinistic discipline had molded
the New England conscience. That serious self-consciousness, that
self-scrutiny, almost morbid at times, by which the Puritan tried to
solve the problem of his personal salvation, to determine whether he