paid with beaver skins and musket balls, which latter were worth a farthing each, and were current to the amount of a shilling. The Dutch of Manhattan taught the Puritans a more commodious means, the use of the shell-work called wampum. Three black grains or six white ones mado a penny; these were made into strings worth from threepence to six shillings.

So went on the arduous work of civilization, not by wealth but by resolute labor, by the bee, by mutual aid, by individual respect, by the liberty of each province. Every township, centering in itself, free to exist as it could, faithful to its personal customs, was yet obedient to the great Christian laws. There was no unique and absorbing centre; no theoretic pretension, no rhetoricians, no disciplinary unity. The idea of property was everywhere distinct, giving to each family the greatest possible happiness, to each village the greatest possible wealth; to cach province the greatest possible influenco and commerce. All these groups, balanced by their mutual strength, had a common and general elective motive power; hope, life, activity. Nothing violent, ambitious, chimerical or hazardous; there was only the simplo and normal development of the Teutonic genius, of the Christian institutions of the Middle Ages, their essence, their variety, their strength and their freedom.

Not only are the useful and fertilizing elements of this great epoch still found in America, but the fiercer Middle Age elements are neither wanting nor annulled; they form a part integral, of the solid germ from which a new civilization must spring, and possess all the qualities requisite, resistance and endurance.

It is not the absence but the excess of Christian sentiment which has founded America; there it is perpetuated under the form of mitigated fraternity. The Puritan of 1620,

a protestant inquisitor, who went to struggle against Nature, only to escape the religious tyranny of Europe, would make us quake to-day, estimable as he was. Armed, in his turn, with fire and sword to smite all hereties, wizards, and witches, this martyr of Catholic or Anglican persecution, became, as soon as he found himself free, a fearful persecutor. The first epoch of American civilization is full of his cruelties. The principal types are the famous Increase Mather, and his son Cotton, two figures colder than Calvin and bloodier than Knox. The first Colonists coarse, violent, fierce and austere, of implacable severity, pushed credulity and fanaticism to the extremity of barbarity. Honest they were, serious, sincere, manly; they could fight against savages, cold, hunger, distress, if need be, against the very Devil; indeed, they had a peculiar taste, for a combat with that personage. If they did not discover him on their way, they went in search of him, and frequently gave themselves the pleasure of burning a witch. Yet they did not destroy American Seciety, they founded it. Fanaticism is the exaggeration of Faith, but not its poison; a formidable astringent, it proves the social vitality of which it is the excess and the abuse.

The old municipal registers of some of the towns in Massachusetts, between 16-10 and 1680 have been reprinted. "Jano Edwards is to be imprisoned for having pressed Jonathan Willianis' hand.-The little Johnson shall have thirty stripes and be put on bread and water, for sleeping in church.-Mary Merivale shall do public penance, bare-footed, for pronouncing the name of God without respect."-As for witch histories, they abound from the beginning and recall the history of Urbain Grandier and the possessed of Loudon. "Between 1688 and 1692" says a chronicler, 66 we had in Boston a fearful and singular example of the wiles of the demon. In a respectable family, four young children, the

eldest a girl of thirteen, and the youngest a boy of nine, were attacked with demoniacal convulsions, which presented all tho symptoms given by the best writers upon the subject. These children complained of being bitten, pinched and tortured by invisible beings; they barked like dogs and miaouled like cats. The frightened father hastened to send for Dr. Oaks, a renowned theologian, and a great physician of souls, who declared that the children were possessed. An old Irish woman, a servant in the house, was denounced, as a witch by the eldest sister, who had quarrelled with her; the other children confirmed the testimony of their sister. The four. ministers of Boston, and the one of Charlestown, met in the house and male long prayers, by which the youngest boy found himself considerably soothed. The others persisted and the Irish woman was imprisoned. Being asked if she was a sorceress, she replied "she flattered herself that she was." As she was very poor and of lowly estate, she fancied that her relations with the demon would procure her some credit. She was hanged."

This occurred during the voyage of Increase Mather to London whither he had gone to ask aid for the colony; ho had left behind him a worthy son, Cotton Mather, aged twenty-five, as ardent as his father in pursuit of the demon." He took an active part in the execution of the Irish woman, and then desiring to examine more closely the diabolical operations, he caused the eldest girl to be taken to his house, where he lodged her, watched all her actions, followed all her motions, and wrote a journal about her which still exists, printed, under the title of "Memorable Providences manifested on the subject of possession and sorcery." In a special document, joined to this work, the four ministers attest tho. truth of all therein contained, and Cotton adds a thundering preface, wherein he does not fail to uplift himself against those

Sadducees who will not believe in the Devil, and are conBequently Atheists. The book was reprinted in London, with a preface by the worthy Baxter.

For fifty years, an epidemic of demoniac possessions vexed Massachusetts. Four years after the young girl, retired into private life, had ceased to be the object of popular curiosity; the whole village of Salem was possessed. Curious scenes took place in the church. Rival women arose and accused each other of sorcery in the temple itself. Many innocents perished, and the affair was only put a stop to by tortures..

At the moment that these fierce ideas began to be softened, when the Christianity of these men, quitting this exalted fanaticism, became a more humane and prudent, even a finessing charity, in 1715, Franklin was nine years old Activity was preserved, energy had not disappeared, the religious spirit existed in men's hearts, as powerful, and less sharp. Franklin and Washington, apostles of toleration, gentleness, and pacific activity, began to rise and grow in the midst of this reactionary movement, submitted to a new impulso. Franklin represents the second epock which now expires, and which was signalized by the American independence.

SECTION IV.

THIRD ERA OF NORTH AMERICA VESTIGES OF PURITAN

FANATICISM-MORMONS AND

MILLERITES-CATHOLICS IN

THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

A third cra is commencing. Now that colonization, Luished on the Atlantic sca-board, goes on triumphantly in the Valley of the Mississippi, and from the great northern

lakes to Sierra Nevada, the new reaction manifests itself: it is an impulse towards enterprise, war, conquest. The old faith, in its rigor, has left few traces: activity has become. extraordinarily energetic charity and concord have trans formed themselves, little by little, into patriotism. the love of glory and of war break forth strongly. Still the Past lives in the Present, and the old Puritan germ is not dead." Nine tenths of the citizens of the United States are still Protestants: the Northern States preserve some Puritan sap; those of the South lean towards tolerance, towards Presbyterianism: or towards Catholicism, of which the activity concentrates itself in the fertile Valley of the Mississippi. All the North, especially where the Mathers lived, dislikes the pacific element of this modified protestantism which is so general in southern and western cities, which is protected and favored by men of instruction, the capitalists, the whigs, or, as they may be called, the moderates or conservateurs. The new element of warlike enterprise, peculiar to democrats, to country-folk, to workmen, to the active, vehement mass, always eager to change the Present, mingles easily and well with the old Puritan element. Hence, that strange enterprise of the Mormons, who are trying to reconstitute, in the Rocky Mountains, the Biblical, patriarchal unity of power; and hence the sect of Millerites, Millenium people, who in their turn took refuge in the White Mountains.

The Millerite and Mormon follies are marks of the alliance of the popular genius, with the old Puritan leaven.

The Prophet Miller announced the end of the world for October 23, 1844; but as the event did not correspond with the prediction, he put it off until October 23, 1817. The popular masses of the North were shaken, and the fanatic, movement extended as far as Philadelphia. Farmers neglected their labor, and public officers were appointed to rescue their

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