"Finding those two brothers to be of high spirits, and their speeches and practices tending to mutiny and faction, the governor told them that New England was no place for such as they, and therefore he sent them both back for England at the return of the ships the same year."[98:1] Neither then nor afterward was there any trace of doubt in the minds of the New England settlers, in going three thousand miles away into the seclusion of the wilderness, of their indefeasible moral right to pick their own company.
There was abundant opportunity for mistake and temptation to wrong-doing in the exercise of this right, but the right itself is so nearly self-evident as to need no argument.
While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea that great _coup d'etat_ which is to create, almost in a day, a practically independent American republic.

Until this is accomplished the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power.

Suppose, now, that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what then?
This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual, over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved.

The old officers of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of 1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay.

It was the beginning of the great Puritan exodus.