They were the aristocrats, and for the common people to clamor for political freedom was absurd.

The idea of republicanism was as loathsome to them and watched with as much jealousy as an important labor movement is to-day.

The royalists called the men who clamored for civil and religious liberty fanatics, just as the monopolists of to-day, who control the dominant parties, call men who cry out against their oppression fanatics.

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the instinct of fanaticism from the soundest judgment, for fanaticism is sometimes the keenest sagacity.

Those men wanted liberty and struggled and fought for it until it was obtained, just as the toiling millions of the world will some day sting the heel of grinding monopolies.
From 1660 to 1671, all New England was kept in a perpetual state of alarm and excitement.