During the seventeenth century, England made bold experiments in popular self-government, first trying them in the democratic religious sects and then carrying them out into wider areas of the state. Such groups as the Seekers, the Brownists, the Quakers, and other mystics held to the democratic principle of church organization, which became in the course of time the basis of English and American government. Professor Jones in this volume brings out the close connection between these religious movements and the political issues then being settled.