Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/506

 496 Providence Meeting of the t such quantities as to make comparisons fruitful. Of these we may name the Merchant Adventurers, the Eastland Company, the Mus- 1 covy, Levant, and East India companies. Miss Kingsbury in- ( stituted comparisons between the Virginia Company and these, and also, so far as possible, the Providence Island Company, in | respect to organization of the former as a joint stock corporation, | its arrangements for the division of land and for returns from the ! joint stock, its instructions to outgoing agents and to the managers t of its industrial enterprises, its financial system and the pecuniary i result of its endeavors both in the period of large expenditures under / Sir Thomas Smythe, and in the period of Sir Edwin Sandys, when compan}^ expenditures were less but were extensively sup- I plemented by investments in minor associations subsidiary to the ( company itself. Miss Kingsbury properly emphasized the need, I if this large trading movement is to be comparatively studied, of j completer access to the copious bodies of materials for the history | of the Royal African Company, the Providence Island Company, ' the Levant Company, and several others. The paper which followed, by Professor Barrett Wendell of Harvard University, was of a general character, endeavoring to suggest the specific differences which distinguish three varieties of New England character — those centring in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. All these have their origin, he held, in the English character of the early seventeenth century, which brought to Massachusetts two incompatible tendencies — those of Protestantism, or the right of the individual to freedom from spiritual control, and of ecclesiastical system, in the peculiar form which this assumed in the early churches of New England. The typical character of Massachusetts, he suggested, has resulted from an unbroken conflict between these tendencies; while the typical character of Rhode Island has resulted from the dominant develop- ment of the Protestant tradition ; and that of Connecticut from the dominant development of the ecclesiastical. Accordingly, the individuals of Massachusetts have been somewhat more distinctly developed ; and the types of Rhode Island and of Connecticut have been, on the whole, more -strongly pronounced. In illustra- tion, he cited the character of Edwards, a native of Connecticut ; Channing, a native of Rhode Island ; and Emerson, a native of Massachusetts. Edwards, the greatest spiritual force produced by America in the eighteenth century, was the best exponent of com- plete divine authority ; Channing stood as no other man for indi- vidual libertv within the limits of order; Emerson cast aside all