toleration was allowed; for the aim of the New Englanders was not
religious freedom, but a free field for the rigid enforcement of
their own shade of orthodoxy.

Thus, in these first English settlements, the deliberate
encouragement of varieties of type was from the outset a
distinguishing note, and the home authorities neither desired nor
attempted to impose a strict uniformity with the rules and methods
existing in England. There was as great a variety in social and
economic organisation as in religious beliefs between the
aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the democratic
agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only was
there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing
institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None,
indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New
Englanders. They came out organised as religious congregations, in
which every member possessed equal rights, and they took the
congregational system as the basis of their local government, and
church membership as the test of citizenship; nor did any other
colonies attain the right, long exercised by the New Englanders,
of electing their own governors. But there was no English
settlement, not even the little slave-worked plantations in the
West Indian islands, like Barbados, which did not set up, as a
matter of course, a representative body to deal with problems of
legislation and taxation, and the home government never dreamt of
interfering with this practice. Already in 1650, the English
empire was sharply differentiated from the Spanish, the Dutch, and
the French empires by the fact that it consisted of a scattered
group of self-governing communities, varying widely in type, but
united especially by the common possession of free institutions,