*t The Code of 1650 abounds in preventive measures.

It punishes idleness and drunkenness with severity.
*u Innkeepers are forbidden to furnish more than a certain quantity of liquor to each consumer; and simple lying, whenever it may be injurious, *v is checked by a fine or a flogging.

In other places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration which he had himself upheld in Europe, renders attendance on divine service compulsory, *w and goes so far as to visit with severe punishment, ** and even with death, the Christians who chose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own.

*x Sometimes indeed the zeal of his enactments induces him to descend to the most frivolous particulars: thus a law is to be found in the same Code which prohibits the use of tobacco.

*y It must not be forgotten that these fantastical and vexatious laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested, and that the manners of the community were even more austere and more puritanical than the laws.
In 1649 a solemn association was formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair.