The men who came to this country on the Mayflower were men who, with their forbears, had been furnishing England with much news long before they set sail. They were, in the main, of the mass of people. They were men who had been persecuted, who had suffered, who had been jailed in England for their principles and for striving for their liberty, though they had little in common with the Barons who through Magna Charta had wrested from the Crown the power of absolute rule.
These Puritan insurrectionists had been nurtured by the printing press. Beginning with the struggle to hold religious views that were interdicted by the government, they had broadened gradually into unconscious exponents of free government; and the government, seeing that it was from the press that they had gained courage and boldness, subjected the press to a rigorous censorship, printing being forbidden, save in London, Oxford and Cambridge, as far back as Queen Elizabeth's time.
When Brewster and his flock first left England, they went to Leyden, where, as in no other place in Europe, there were free schools, and where, as Motley says,[1] "every child went to school, where almost every individual inhabitant could read and write, where even the middle classes were proficient in mathematics and the classics and could speak two or more modern languages." Campbell says, that during the sixteenth century "this little country published more books than the rest of Europe put together, and while England was suppressing and censoring the press, the author here was free to express his thoughts so long as he committed no libel and wrote nothing to offend the public morals."[2]
