It is as follows: "Let me here repeat and emphasize that it may be remembered by and by that this 'Dorchester Company,' originally founded on the transfer of a portion of the patent of Gorges, and afterwards enlarged and re-authorized by the Charter of Charles the First, as the 'Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay,' was in its beginning, and in point of fact, neither more nor less than a private corporation chartered by the Government for purposes of fishing, real estate improvement, and general commerce, for which it was to pay the Crown a fifth part of all precious metals which it might unearth.

It was then more than this only in the same sense as the egg, new-laid, is the full-grown fowl, or the acorn the oak.

It was not yet a State.

It was not, even in the beginning, in the ordinary sense, a colony.

It was a plantation with a strong religious idea behind it, on its way to be a colony and a state.