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 Instead of banishing merchants and artisans to enrich other countries, English statesmen opened the gates of their American colonies to every kind of religious faith that the stirring life of the Old World could furnish—to Catholics, Separatists, Puritans, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists from the British Isles; to Lutherans, Dunkards, Moravians, Mennonites, Huguenots, and Salzburgers from the Continent. They looked with favor upon the German Lutherans who crowded into Pennsylvania, subdued the wilderness, and produced wheat, corn, bacon, and lumber to exchange for English manufactures. They even winked at news of Jews settling here and there in the colonies, especially after Oliver Cromwell's example in toleration at home. When the plantations were once started and their significance to trade and empire disclosed, it was impossible to bring them into any scheme of religious uniformity. On the contrary clerical authority waned with the growth of business enterprise.

In the operations that unhorsed the feudal lords and disintegrated the power of the clergy, the merchants and landed gentry of England attained a high degree of self-government and civil liberty. Unlike France and Spain, England had never discarded the institution of representative government which had sprung up in the middle ages. Serving as voters and members of the House of Commons and as justices of the peace in the counties, towns, and parishes, the gentry and merchants had long taken part in the administration of public affairs. And in the seventeenth century they definitely attained supremacy in the state by the establishment of parliamentary sovereignty. As in France long afterward, this revolution was accompanied by violence, the execution of the king, social disorder, the seizure of property, extreme measures, dictatorship, reaction, and the ultimate triumph of the essential ideas advanced by the leaders in the uprising.