slit their nostrils, and mutilated their ears. JOHN COTTON, pastor of the
church of Boston, England, was told that if he had been guilty only of an
infraction of certain of the Ten Commandments, he might have been pardoned,
but since his crime was Puritanism, he must suffer. He had great trouble in
escaping on a ship bound for the New England Boston.

[Illustration: JOHN COTTON]

Professor Tyler says: "New England has perhaps never quite appreciated its
great obligations to Archbishop Laud. It was his overmastering hate of
nonconformity, it was the vigilance and vigor and consecrated cruelty with
which he scoured his own diocese and afterward all England, and hunted down
and hunted out the ministers who were committing the unpardonable sin of
dissent, that conferred upon the principal colonies of New England their
ablest and noblest men."

It should be noted that the Puritan colonization of New England took place
in a comparatively brief space of time, during the twenty years from 1620
to 1640. Until 1640 persecution drove the Puritans to New England in
multitudes, but in that year they suddenly stopped coming. "During the one
hundred and twenty-five years following that date, more persons, it is
supposed, went back from the New to the Old England than came from the Old
England to the New," says Professor Tyler. The year 1640 marks the
assembling of the Long Parliament, which finally brought to the block both
Archbishop Laud (1645) and King Charles I. (1649), and chose the great
Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, to lead the Commonwealth.

ELIZABETHAN TRAITS.--The leading men in the colonization of Virginia and
New England were born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), and they
and their descendants showed on this side of the Atlantic those