THE Journal of John Winthrop, founder of the colony of Massachusetts Bay in New England, recording the story of that colony during the first nineteen years of its existence, must always have an interest not only for New England but for America in general, and indeed for the world at large. Though a few Englishmen may have made a precarious lodg�ment on the New England coast before 1620, no proper settlement took place until December of that year, when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Ten years later, in 1630, came Winthrop's company. After the lapse of another ten years, during which time the English in New England increased to about twenty thousand, the immigration suddenly ceased; with the opening of the Long Parliament the grievances which had driven into exile so many of the non-conformists no longer pressed heavily. For almost two hundred years the New England stock received no further accretion from home and almost no new elements. An isolated, homogeneous population, it multiplied largely within itself, and began at the end of the eighteenth century to send its children westward.¹

What the twenty thousand Puritan Englishmen and their descendants have accomplished is worth taking note of. Almost at once, dating from the early years of th