Ryan Jankowski’s Reviews > John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father > Status Update

From the General Obervations (reasons to emigrate) "Inflation has soared so that “no man’s estate will suffice him to keep sail with his equal and he that doeth not must live in contempt,” leading many to engage in deceitful and ungodly behavior in order to maintain their status, and making it impossible “for a good upright man to maintain his charge and to live comfortably in his profession"

Oxford and Cambridge universities, “the fountains of learning and religion, are so corrupted” (and expensive) that “many children of best wits and fairest hopes are perverted, corrupted, and utterly overthrown by the multitude of evil examples and licentious government of those seminaries.”

The killings and depredations of the Munster uprising and the Nine Years War reinforced the image of the Irish as barbarous, brutish, treacherous, and superstitious—everything that the English were not and rejected. In colonizing Ireland the English would gradually move from a policy of civilizing the natives to a policy of displacing them. The parallel with North America is striking.