PREFACE I HAVE attempted in the following pages to trace the origin and development of Puritanism, the greatest moral and political force of modern times, with special reference to its influence on the people and institutions of the United States, my lines of investigation differing widely from those which have heretofore been followed by historians. How the work came to be undertaken is, of course, in itself a matter of no importance. And yet a public, well-nigh surfeited with books about the Puritans and the early settlers of America, may reasonably call upon an author to give, at the outset, some good reason for asking a further share of its attention to an old and apparently threadbare subject. To such a very proper question this preface is intended as an answer. When a law student, more than twenty-five years ago, I began collecting material for a history of the jurisprudence of Colonial New York. The field was comparatively unexplored, for, as I discovered, most persons supposed that little was left of the old records. Much to my surprise, I found in various quarters a great wealth of matter, and after some years began to arrange the results of my investigations. Then, finding how closely political and legal questions were intertwined in this early history, I concluded to enlarge the scope of my work, so as to show the growth not only of the legal but of the constitutional system of the state. And here I met a series of surprises, for I encountered at every turn traces of institutions and ideas, generally supposed to have been derived from England, or at least to be of New England origin, but which clearly, so far as concerned New York, were derived from a different quarter. Here were free schools, the system of recording deeds and mortgages, lands held in common by the towns-all under the old Dutch rule; here the doctrine was first laid down by a legislative assembly that the people are the source of political authority; here were first established permanent religious freedom, the right of petition, and the freedom of the press. On the other hand, here were no executions of witches or Quakers, and no kidnapping and enslavement of the Indians. In comparing this record with that of New England, the points of contrast were no less remarkable than those of resemblance, while all the deductions from such a comparison were opposed to the ideas inculcated by our current histories. From their earliest school-days Americans have been told that this nation is a transplanted England, and that we must look to the mother-land as the home of our institutions. But the men who founded New York were not Englishmen; they were Hollanders, Walloons, and Huguenots. The colony was under Dutch law for half a century; its population was probably not half English even at the time of the Revolu tion; and yet here one finds some of the institutions which give America its distinctive character, while, what is more remarkable, no trace of many of these same institutions can be found in England. What was their origin became to me an interesting question. New York, which was first settled, certainly did not derive them from New England, and New England probably did not derive them from New York. Could there have been a common fountain which fed both these streams, the debt to which has never been acknowledged? Of course, the Netherland Republic must have been this fountain, if one existed; but to prove its existence, and the mode in which its influence was exerted on New England, required an examination far outside the records of New York. Hence a new set of questions arose before me, relating to the character and environment of the men who settled America, especially the Pilgrims who lived so many years in Holland, and the Puritans who flocked there in thousands during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts; what civilization they had as Englishmen, what they saw and learned among the Dutch, and what they carried back to England and across the Atlantic. The importance of the latter questions can be seen at once. If I was correct in my hypothesis as to the debt which America owes to Holland-a debt incurred not only through New York, but also through the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England, and, as I afterwards discovered, through the Quakers of Pennsylvania-then our American history would occupy a different position from that usually accorded to it. Instead of standing alone as a phenomenon, to be studied by itself, or as a |