While the civil and ecclesiastical foundations of the Salem community are thus being laid, there is preparing on the other side of the sea that great _coup d'état_ which is to create, almost in a day, a practically independent American republic. Until this is accomplished the colonial organization is according to a common pattern, a settlement on a distant shore, equipped, sustained, and governed with authority all but sovereign by a commercial company at the metropolis, within the reach, and thus under the control, of the supreme power. Suppose, now, that the shareholders in the commercial company take their charter conferring all but sovereign authority, and transport themselves and it across the sea to the heart of the settlement, there to admit other planters, at their discretion, to the franchise of the Company, what then? This was the question pondered and decided in those dark days of English liberty, when the triumph of despotism, civil and spiritual, over the rights of Englishmen seemed almost achieved. The old officers of the Company resigned; their places were filled by Winthrop and Dudley and others, who had undertaken to emigrate; and that memorable season of 1630 not less than seventeen ships, carrying about one thousand passengers, sailed from English ports for Massachusetts Bay. It was the beginning of the great Puritan exodus. Attempts were made by the king and the archbishop to stay the flow of emigration, but with only transient success. "At the end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or four thousand families, including the few hundreds who were here before him, had come over in three hundred vessels, at a cost of two hundred thousand pounds sterling."[99:1] What could not be done by despotism was accomplished by the triumph of the people over the court. The meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 made it safe for Puritans to stay in England; and the Puritans stayed. The current of migration was not only checked, but turned backward. It is reckoned that within four generations from that time more persons went to old England than originally came thence. The beginnings of this return were of high importance. Among the home-going companies were men who were destined to render eminent service in the reconstruction of English society, both in the state and in the army, and especially in the church. The example of the New England churches, voluminously set forth in response to written inquiries from England, had great influence in saving the mother country from suffering the imposition of a Presbyterian hierarchy that threatened to be as intolerant and as intolerable as the tyranny of Laud.