The law of dispersion, practical and agreeable to the Southern
landholder, would have been destruction to his New England
brethren. For the latter, concentration was the only safety. They
massed together in close communities, and necessarily were forced
to plan for the general rather than for the individual good. In
such close quarters, where every angle made itself felt, and
constant contact developed and implied criticism, law must work
far more minutely than in less exacting communities. Every
tendency to introspection and self-judging was strengthened to the
utmost, and merciless condemnation for one's self came to mean a
still sharper one for others. With every power of brain and soul
they fought against what, to them, seemed the one evil for that or
any time--toleration. Each man had his own thought, and was able
to put it into strong words. No colony has ever known so large a
proportion of learned men, there being more graduates of Cambridge
and Oxford between the years 1630 and 1690 than it was possible to
find in a population of the same size in the mother country. "In
its inception, New England was not an agricultural community, nor
a manufacturing community, nor a trading community; it was a
thinking community---an arena and mart for ideas--its characteristic
organ being not the hand, nor the heart, nor the pocket, but
the brain."

The material for learning, we have seen, was of the scantiest, not
only for Winthrop's Colony but for those that preceded it.

The three little ships that, on a misty afternoon in December,
1606, dropped down the Thames with sails set for an unknown
country, carried any freight but that of books. Book-makers were
there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that,