The Daily Citizen

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 1889

RETRIBUTION.

There is a line somewhere, and possibly some of our readers have stumbled upon it, about the mills of the gods etc.—we do not propose to quote it—but it comes up suggestively in association with a kind of retributive justice which seems to be overtaking New England in these latter days. That retribution falls upon its population and upon its religion.

New England was settled by the salt of the earth, the most exclusive of nationalists, the most intolerant of religionists. It is very true that the first who came "to the wild New England shore" could not have come in very amiable mood: they came as fugitives from political and religious intolerance; and they came to encounter hardships which no doubt tried their souls, perhaps soured their tempers. But they ought not to plead those hardships as reasons for the hardships they visited with so much delight on others. They found themselves in the position most to be desired by those "persecuted for righteousness sake;" they had beautiful opportunity of returning evil for good, and of turning the other cheek to the smiter. It does not appear that they did it then, or that they have ever done it since. They went right on their way, smiting the heathen, hip and thigh, improving them out of the land with all despatch; and having done that to their full contentment, turned upon the unhappy beings of their own race also fugitives from tyranny and religious persecution, worshippers of the same God, but worshipping often under a different ritual. The Springfield Republican endeavors to extenuate the expulsion of the Baptists and Quakers from Massachusetts, the first and most powerful of the Puritan colonies, under the plea of priority of possession, and the statement that no one was forced to accompany them. The first comes back, in effect, to the old claim, "the land belongs to the saints; we are the saints; therefore the land is exclusively ours." The other is inconsistent with the liberality and charity expected of those, who, suffering themselves, might have been taught to respect the sufferings of others. But they did not; and the Baptists and the Quakers went forth as exiles into their own new wilderness, leaving nothing behind for the Puritans to persecute except the witches, and some poor unfortunate who might be compelled to wear the Scarlet Letter, and publicly submit to the scorn and reproof of heartless censors.

The Republican says:

"The State they founded was theological rather than theocratic, and the intolerance practiced from the start was the granting of leave to withdraw from the colony in cases where so-called heresy became offensive to the community. When a man settled in a New England plantation of the 17th century he knew that his continued residence depended upon certain beliefs. It was when he turned Quaker or Baptist and still clung to his residence that he was persecuted. This so far from justification, is condemnation. Modern thought and feeling can enter with no sympathy into that bigoted exclusiveness, which, drawing no lesson from its own bitter experience visited upon the persecuted of other creeds, the sin, that had been visited upon themselves. With a protest against intolerance as practiced upon themselves, with a broad, new clear field upon which to put in practice the noblest theories and principles of wise and generous liberality, there can be little forgiveness for those who practiced with alacrity the teachings of their own persecutors, and exaggerated them with every refinement of cold and calculating cruelty. It is heartless attempts at exoneration of the bigoted Puritan to say that when a man was of another belief, he knew the penalties that awaited him. He ought to have known nothing of the kind. He ought more naturally to have believed that sufferings in the same fiery ordeal would have drawn them to each other in the closest bonds of sympathy."

The Puritan built up his commonwealth after his own heart by tearing up and weeding out all the elements of noxious growth. He made a commonwealth that has made its mark upon history. But that mark he could only inscribe to a certain depth. It is wearing out. It is threatened with speedy effacement. Race habits, creeds, are fast fading away; and the time seems to be coming when the Puritans will survive only as a historical reminiscence and a theological nightmare.

From an article in the Forum by Mr. A. L. Bartlett, a New Englander, we make the following extract:

"A century ago there was scarcely to be found a foreigner in Massachusetts. To-day out of a population of 1,942,110, the foreign-born number 527,867, not including such children of alien parentage that were born in the United States. Of 122,263 illiterate persons of ten years or over, nearly 89 per cent. are of foreign birth. The foreign-born represent one-fifth of the people employed in the fisheries, two-fifths of those employed in manufactures, and two-thirds of those employed in mining and as laborers. At the close of the revolution there was scarcely a corporal's guard of Roman Catholics in all New England. To-day they claim to be 1,211,000 in a population of 4,500,000. Two great currents of immigration, the earlier from ill-starred Ireland, the later from the French provinces of Canada, have made a marked change, not only in the population, but in the ecclesiastical status, the political position and the probable future of New England. The Irish immigration in large numbers began in 1847, the Canadian French immigration twenty years later."