developed in other lands and times, it did not so cramp and fetter the human spirit in New England as to render it incapable of self -guidance when the old restraints and limitations were no more. 1
Now that its controlling spirit of gravity and provincialism was being replaced by a general temper of comparative light-heartedness and open-mindedness, of unaffected enjoyment of the good things of life, of the acceptance of standards far more natural than those of the earlier day, the transition was accomplished with a relative absence of accompanying instances of moral lapse and disaster nothing less than remarkable. A considerable amount of the boisterousness and heat of the day over which clerical Jeremiahs and others of like conservative leanings ceased not to pour out their complaints, 2 is explicable on the ground of the growing habit of the mass of the people to exercise the rights of citizenship through direct participation in the affairs of the day. For far more significant than any evidence of moral blindness and perversity on the part of the people in general is the fact that a great, crowding, hungry democracy was knocking at the gates of the old aristocratic regime and insistently urging the consideration of its rights.
2. OMINOUS DISCONTENT WITH THE STANDING ORDER
The general impression of a revolt against morality and religion in New England near the close of the eighteenth
- 1 Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii, pp. 864 et seq.
- 2 Scudder, Recollections of Samuel Breck, with Passages from His Note-Books, pp. 178 et seq. Breck visited New England about 1791. He was impressed with the looseness of life and gross lawlessness which he saw. A fairer judgment appears on page 182: "The severe, gloomy puritanical spirit that had governed New England since the days of the Pilgrim forefathers was gradually giving way in the principal towns", etc.
