That our picture may know some completeness, however, it is needful to glance at the effect of these women and others like them upon the female world of New England. While Anne Hutchinson in some sense stood alone of her sex, Mary Dyer was only one of a great number of devoted men and women, merely singled out by her fate for enduring memory. The women of the Quakers, driven by the Spirit, went through the land preaching, in defiance of all the laws that were fulminated against them. We must not be too sudden or violent in our condemnation of the men who sat in judgment upon these people, for to the Puritan the Quaker represented a peril which in this day we cannot comprehend, while the Puritan had also the excuse for harshness that he owned the land and only desired the Quaker to remain outside his borders. Yet, when this is said, we can but give the most hearty admiration to the superb courage of the people who believed it to be their duty to intrude where they were not desired, and, believing, shrank from no consequence of their faith. Their women, with whom we have most particularly to do, suffered grievously for their devotion; they were whipped at the cart's tail, they were maimed, they were branded, they were even hanged; yet they persisted. By their devotion they not only gained many adherents--rarely open sympathizers, but secret friends--but set a standard for womanhood. Gradually the Puritan camp, under the constancy of their foes, became divided. The majority of the Puritans, and especially of their women, grew more and more virulent as the Quakers persisted in their "intrusion"; but there was among the women an element, ever growing and strengthening, which found inspiration in the methods of those whom they had at first contemned. They had themselves suffered for their faith, though not as these others; and they found a respect for those who shrank from no penalty so that they might testify to their faith and do service. It is after the coming of the Quakers that we find the New England woman more determined, more active, more bound to high ideals. The mark of the despised Quakers remained deeply graven, in effect if not in heredity, on the New England character, especially in its women. Moreover, the example of the female preachers of the Quakers had its effect in urging upon the New England woman hitherto undreamed-of possibilities of making herself heard in the councils of the land. Seeing what women could do as well as bear, the New England woman was made stronger for both, and she did not forget the lesson which came to her through those whom at first she received with hatred and despite.