The English in America (Volume 2); The Puritan Colonies (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of the law. In going through any of the genealogies handed down from the early days of New England life, one cannot fail to be struck with the number who have died in infancy. If this were so in thriving and educated households, among the Winthrops and Sewells and Mathers, where the children were spared as far as might be from hardship, were tended with intelligence, and had the benefit of such scanty medical skill as the colony could boast, how would it be with the family of a yeoman or artizan in an outlying village ? The change of climate, telling on a race not yet inured to it, the winter air of New England imperfectly kept out by a rough log hut, go far to explain this. It is hardly fanciful to think that the gloomy training of a New England household, with its monotony, its utter lack of moral sunshine, may have helped. By the joint operation of these laws the population of New England was at once abundantly replenished joint work- an(l ruthlessly weeded. Like a tribe of savage opposite0 llien or f w1ld beasts, it was exposed to a piti- tenuendes. less prOcess of selection. Such a process must conduce to the physical vigour of a race; it would de- velope those qualities which accompany physical vigour and depend on it. But there are other qualities to which it would be fatal. That the spirit of a Shelley could ever have shaped itself in the life of New England was impossible. But the impossibility dated from a stage earlier than that of training and culture. The birth of a possible Shelley in a Puritan household would have been a striking instance of what physiologists call atavism. But even if the portent had occurred, we may be pretty sure that ' died in infancy ' would have been the only record of it in the family register. Physical selection was part of the process wh...