Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/58

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while maintaining the extraordinary advance that had marked her splendid reign. Without James's mingled poltroonery and tyranny to nurse and stimulate it, it is doubtful if Puritanism would have had its spasm of ascendency. English history would have been spared an epoch of chaos, of wild experimentation, of political empirics.

At the same time it would have been deprived of a form of political genius which was hammered out of the fire of rebellion. English Whiggism, English liberalism, English nonconformity have made the world over anew. America, in particular, would have been infinitely poorer without the Puritan ferment. Should we have had the New England migration at all, if England had continued its calm and homogeneous development under Elizabethan influences? Would not rather all America have been like Virginia, and the new world organized on a roast-beef, plum-pud-