So right from the beginning of the seventeenth century, you had, side by side, dark and fanatic Massachusetts, founded in 1620 to establish "the reign of the spirit", and the State of New York founded seven years earlier to establish the dominion of the dollar. On the one hand, democratic equality, scorn for material wealth, and aversion for any reminders of the titles and privileges of old Europe; on the other hand, a society both mercantile and patrician, descended from an oligarchy founded by the Dutch West India Company. Thus, side by side, were two groups representing the two principal motives of human action: the will to sacrifice everything to intellectual and moral conviction, and the desire for wealth and the enjoyment of life. I, who am a descendant of the Dutch merchants and of their English successors, confess that I am glad not to have been brought up in the shadow of the gloomy theocracy of Massachusetts. Nevertheless, I must admit that those who sacrificed everything for their ideas are the ones who shaped the soul of my country most profoundly, more profoundly than those who faced similar dangers for material gain.
