Excerpt from The Real America in Romance, Vol. 5: On Savage Shores, the Age of Consolidation, 1620-1643 But, however limited the tolerance in religion, these colonists of English speech and tradition brought with them a measure of civil liberty unknown in the world else where. The voyagers on the Mayflower entered into a solemn compact for self-government which left them, except for a commercial contract with the Plymouth company, virtually independent of the world. Less than a score of years later, the new colony of Connecticut formally executed a constitution so broad in its principles that it remains to this day as a complete form of civil order, containing within itself every essential feature of the fundamental laws of the Federal Government and Sovereign States of the Union. It left Connecticut for twenty years as free from external control as any State of Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.