NEW ENGLAND, the oldest of the five Western Provinces admitted to representation by the Second Frame (q.v.) of 1691, settled a full generation before the Settlement itself by congregations that had crossed the ocean rather than accept the episcopal establishment the first Charles's bishops sought to impose upon them, and governed since, in matters ecclesiastical, by a Congregational discipline the Public Profession (q.v.) at Westminster has always found it easy to recognise as a cousin rather than a stranger. This contributor, whose own theological sympathies lie readily enough with the province's own tradition to require no particular confession, is content to record that no part of the Commonwealth's dominions has kept the godly commonwealth's original ambition — a people governed as much by the meeting-house as by the province's own assembly — more faithfully across two and a half centuries than New England has.
Its early prosperity was built on fishing, timber, and the coasting trade rather than on any single plantation staple, a diversity of livelihood that spared the province the concentration of chattel wealth the Agrarian Law (q.v.)'s loophole encouraged further south, and gave New England's own delegation, when the province was admitted to representation in 1691, a character this contributor's colleagues in provincial history describe as more nearly resembling the Home Provinces' own mercantile interest than that of any of its sister Western Provinces. It was among the foremost of the signatories to the Petition of the Fourteen Towns in 1685, its own ports having felt the Navigation System (q.v.)'s enumeration duties as keenly as any in the Western dominions, and its congregations supplied, across the following century, a disproportionate share of the Commonwealth's own ministers, schoolmasters, and — since the founding of its own college at the province's chief town in the last century — physicians and lawyers besides.
The province's civic character remains, on the returns available to this contributor, the most literate of the Western Provinces by a comfortable margin, its common schools having been established, town by town, well before any statute of the Commonwealth's own required it, on the settled theological conviction — one this contributor finds it no part of an encyclopaedist's office to dispute — that a people required to read their own Scripture unaided by any priest standing between them and it had better be taught to read early and taught well. Whatever this Commonwealth owes its general condition of settled piety, a fair share of the debt, on this contributor's own reckoning, is owed to the province that has never quite let the rest of the Commonwealth forget where the whole undertaking began. (W. R. S.)