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THE same decade and a half, the political events of which we traced in the last chapter, was to witness also religious movements of utmost importance. The firm establishment of the government of Rhode Island, based upon religious liberty, and the preservation of the independence of that colony and of its democratic neighbor, Connecticut, were matters of profound import in the political and intellectual life of America. Not less so was the struggle between the leaders of the theocracy and the growing liberalism of the people of Massachusetts. As usual, the political and religious movements were inextricably intertwined, and the same conditions that brought forth the political disturbance over the petition of Dr. Child and his associates, in 1645, were responsible for the most important step taken in the ecclesiastical organization of the theocracy some months later.

That petition had called attention to undoubted evils and injustices in the political and religious regime in Massachusetts; and however effectually the government might silence the protesting leaders, the underlying causes were so widespread as to necessitate some action in regard to them. Owing to the church-membership test for the franchise, the unenfranchised class was so large, and the disadvantage under which it labored was so palpably unjust, that the demand for reform was growing steadily louder. Not only had there been from the very beginning a considerable element in the population which, under no circumstances, cared to join the New England churches, but there was also a large one which would have been glad to do so, had the process not been made so difficult for them. It was not enough that a person should believe in the doctrines of the Church, that he should desire

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to live a godly life and be in communion with it, but he was also required to have experienced some special motion of God in his heart, by which he had been convicted of his sin, and become regenerate. Of that conversion, he was further obliged to make a public declaration before the congregation, describing the particular manner in which he had thus felt the workings of the spirit within him. Many blameless Christian men and women did not feel that they could discover any such extraordinary change in their lives as their rulers demanded; and modesty and a natural reticence prevented many more from attempting the trying ordeal of publicly detailing such an intimate spiritual experience.[1] Failing that, however, they were debarred from Christian communion and from all voice in the civil government, and their children were also denied baptism and participation in the life of the Church. As in Massachusetts no churches were allowed except such as partook of the "New England way," it followed that those who could not join them were politically disfranchised, and that they and their children were cut off from the advantages of Christian fellowship and discipline.

In so far as the resultant political disabilities were concerned, there were two ways in which the situation might have been remedied The first and, according to modern ideas, the natural one would have been to do away with the religious qualification for the franchise. This was, theoretically at least, the method of Plymouth and Connecticut and Rhode Island, and of the Bay Colony in so far as its possessions in Maine were concerned. Nevertheless, it did not commend itself to the Massachusetts leaders, and for that reason, and also to meet the religious features of the case, a second method was favored by many, of making less rigid the requirements for admission to the church. Of the two methods, the latter would, of course, be more acceptable to the clergy, not as a step forward, but as the lesser of two evils. They were, in fact, at that very time planning a more formal organization of all the churches, and the establishment of a uniform practice

[1. Lechford, Plain Dealing, pp. 66 f.]

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among them.[1] The creation of such a standard can hardly be considered as consistent with the principles in which Congregationalism had originated; but the Church in Massachusetts had become as completely a state church as the Anglican had ever been in England.[2]

In 1646, soon after the presentation of the Child petition, some of the Elders presented a bill to the General Court, asking that body to call a synod at the end of the summer, to consider these various problems. The bill was promptly passed by the magistrates; but the deputies demurred, denying that the civil authorities had power over the ecclesiastical. It was conceded, however, that the call might go out as a request and not as a command.[3] According to the notice, the synod was to agree "upon one forme of government and discipline," and to consider whether "more liberty and latitude" might be yielded in the matters of church membership and baptism.[4] When their labors should be finished, the result was to be submitted to the General Court, to receive "such approbation as is meete."[5] When the synod met, the churches of Boston and Salem refused to join, partly because they believed that it was intended to bind the liberty of churches by the passage of ecclesiastical laws by the General Court, "whereby men should be forced under penalty to submit to them." In view of a point to be discussed later in the chapter, Winthrop’s account of the origin of the objections is interesting. The principal men who raised them, he wrote, were some "who came lately from England, where such a vast liberty was allowed, and sought for by all that went under the name of Independents, not only the anabaptists, antinomians, familists, seekers, etc., but even the most godly and orthodox, as Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Burrows, etc., who in the assembly there had stood in opposition to the presbytery, and also the greater part of the house of commons, who by their commissioners had sent order to all English plantations in the West Indies and Summers Islands, that all men should enjoy their liberty

[1. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, p. 323.]

[2. Cf. Walker, Creeds, pp. 166 f.]

[3. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, pp. 323 f.]

[4. Massachusetts Records, vol. III, pp. 71 f.]

[5. Ibid., p. 72.]

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of conscience, and had by letters intimated the same to us."[1] Some weeks were consumed in endeavors to change the opinions of the two churches, and when, after much difficulty, that was finally accomplished, there was little time left for the work of the synod, which adjourned in September, to meet the following June. It was not until midsummer, 1648, however, that, after another adjournment, it finally completed its labors.

During the two years which it had been in session, Cromwell and the Independents in England had removed all fear for Massachusetts of Presbyterian or other interference from that country, and the temporary alarm of the leaders had subsided. The question of a more liberal policy, therefore, fell into the background, and the synod occupied itself with the formulation of a strict polity by which innovation might be resisted. Agreement with the recent declaration of Parliament in matters of doctrine was voted by adopting, with certain reservations, the Westminster Confession of Faith; but the suggested religious toleration was, of course, denied.[2] Quite on the contrary, in fact, the Cambridge Platform, as the order of discipline adopted has always been called, provided that the full power of the state should be used to enforce obedience and conformity to the rule and decisions of the priesthood. "Idolatry, Blasphemy, Heresy, Venting corrupt and pernicious opinions," the Platform read, "are to be restrayned and punished by civil authority. If any church one or more shall grow schismaticall, rending it self from the communion of other churches, or shall walke incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own, contrary to the rule of the word; in such case, the Magistrate is to put forth his coercive power, as the matter shall require."[3] What these early American persecutors, drunk with their own conceit, were to think the "matter shall require," when other men refused to accept their personal interpretation of the mind and ways of Almighty God as infallible, will be only too clearly shown in the course of this chapter.

[1. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, p. 329.]

[2. "Cambridge Platform," in Walker, Creeds, p. 195.]

[3. Sections 8 and 9 of chap. xvii, of "Cambridge Platform"; Ibid., p. 237.]

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When the Platform was presented for ratification by the General Court, through the towns, it seems to have met with considerable opposition on the part of the deputies. The magistrates, owing to their customary close working agreement with the ministers, approved of it unanimously; but the deputies, representing public opinion rather than the oligarchy, repeated their opposition of several years earlier. When, in 1645, new laws had been proposed for the punishment of heretics, a brief entry in the records tells of the struggle at that time. "The Howse of Deputies," so it reads, "cannot concur with our honored magistrates in their bill to punish excommunicate persons."[1] They were defeated, however, and the next year a long act was passed for the purpose.[2] Although the Cambridge Platform had been adopted by the synod in 1648, and had been considered several times by the General Court, the deputies of many of the towns, even three years later, still professed themselves unable to "see light to impose any forms as necessary to be observed by the churches as a bindinge rule."[3] When it was finally passed by the Court, in October, 1651, fourteen of the deputies still refused to concur, and their names, an honored roll, are inscribed in the margin of the records.[4] The towns they represented were Boston, Salem, Braintree, Watertown, Roxbury, Wenham, Reading, Sudbury, Weymouth, and Hingham, in Massachusetts, and Hampton in New Hampshire.[5]

The Platform represented no mere abstract doctrine. The whole history of the oligarchy, thus far, indicated that the clauses regarding heresy and schism were not intended to remain dead letters. The new relations of the churches to one another, and the strengthened combination of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, mark the high point attained by the theocracy in its organized opposition to liberty of thought. It had been growing steadily narrower and more intolerant, more insistent upon the extirpation of every idea, religious or political, that disturbed its own control over the minds and

[1. Massachusetts Records, vol. III, p. 16.]

[2. Ibid., p. 99.]

[3. Ibid., p. 236.]

[4. Ibid., p, 240.]

[5. Walker, Creeds, p. 188 n.]

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lives of men. Unfortunately, at the very time when new power for evil was thus being placed in its hands by the action of the synod and the General Court, the more conservative leaders, both of Massachusetts and Connecticut, were lost to their communities by death, and the dangerous weapons were to be wielded by two of the most bigoted and blood-thirsty fanatics whom either Old or New England had produced.

Thomas Hooker died in 1647, as the work of the synod was beginning, and John Winthrop in 1649, as it was ending. There is no comparison in the debt that the political thought of America owes to the two men, whose ideas have already been contrasted on an earlier page. Hooker led the way along which the people of the United States were to follow, while Winthrop was engaged in the attempt to found a state in a politically impossible form. In spite of his inestimable services in the beginnings of the colony, there was no originality in his contribution to thought, and his subservience to the demands of the theocracy had been foreshadowed by his statement in early manhood that he so honored a faithful minister that he "could have kissed his feet."[1] Of high nobility of character, gentle, forgiving, frequently kindest to those from whom he differed most, there was little in his nature of the born persecutor. Led into acts of intolerant zeal by the ministers whom he so devoutly followed, there is considerable probability in the story related by Hutchinson, that when on his death-bed, being pressed by Dudley to sign a warrant for the banishment of a heretic, he refused, saying that "he had done too much of that work already."[2] His portrait depicts a face of gentleness rather than of strength. His unquestioned integrity, his modesty, and his self- sacrificing devotion to the interests of the colony as he saw them, amply fulfilled the high opinion which the original undertakers of the enterprise had formed of him, although, as in the case of most of the leaders, the effect upon mind and character of the transplanting to America was not wholly a happy one. "He was of a more

[1. R. C. Winthrop, J. Winthrop, vol. I, p. 61.]

[2. Hutchinson, History, vol. I, p. 142.]

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catholic spirit than some of his brethren before he left England," wrote Hutchinson; "but afterward he grew more contracted, and was disposed to lay too great stress upon indifferent matters."[1]

The same effect had been felt in the case of John Cotton. The most tolerant, as he was one of the ablest, of the Massachusetts divines, we have already seen how he had started upon the true path when, dismayed by the universal ecclesiastical clamor raised by the Antinomian controversy, he drew back, like Winthrop, and ever after submitted to smaller men. Nevertheless, his death, some months after the final adoption of the Cambridge Platform, removed the last of the three men who by inclination and influence might have done something to stay the theocracy from the course into which it was soon to throw itself headlong. In place of Winthrop and Cotton, its leaders became Endicott and Norton. Able, stern, fiercely bigoted, absolutely convinced of their own infallibility in interpreting the word of God, undeterred by doubt, and unrestrained by pity, they were unwittingly to water the seeds of liberty with the blood of their victims.

In the midsummer of the year in which the Platform was finally adopted by the Court, John Clark, one of the ablest citizens of Rhode Island, Obadiah Holmes, and John Crandall, as representatives of the Baptist church of Newport, arrived at Lynn to visit an aged member of that church, who was too infirm to make a journey himself.[2] In 1644, a law had been passed punishing with banishment anyone who should openly or secretly speak against the orthodox Massachusetts doctrine regarding baptism; and the three Baptists were at once arrested.[3] Clark was fined L20,, Holmes L30, and Crandall L5, in default of which they were to be whipped. The spirit of the court that tried them is vividly shown by two incidents as told by the prisoners themselves. Clark, having asked by what law he was punished, the penalty not being that prescribed

[1. Hutchinson, History, vol. I, p. 142.]

[2. Newport Church Papers, cited by Backus, Baptists, vol. I, p. 178.]

[3. Backus, Baptists, vol. I, p. 198 n.]

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by the ordinance of 1644, relates that Endicott "stept up to us, and told us we had denyed Infants Baptism, and being somewhat transported broke forth, and told me I had deserved death, and said he would not have such trash brought into this jurisdiction."[1] Holmes, describing his own trial, wrote that, when receiving sentence, "I exprest myself in these words; I blesse God I am counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus; whereupon John Wilson (their pastor as they call him) strook me before the judgment Seat, and cursed me, saying, the Curse of God, or Jesus goe with thee."[2]

Crandall, who had figured but little in the proceedings, was released on bail; while, without his knowledge, some unknown well-wishes paid Clark’s fine. Holmes, however, refused to pay his fine or allow others to pay it for him, and insisted upon the sentence being executed in its full barbarity. Thirty strokes, with a three-corded whip, were laid upon his bare back. Two bystanders who, moved by pity, had the temerity to take the prisoner by the hand as he left the whipping-post, were themselves arrested and sentenced to pay forty shillings or be whipped.[3] To one of them, who affirmed to Endicott that he believed Holmes was a godly man and "carried himself as did become a Christian," the Governor threatened that "we will deal with you as we have dealt with him." "I am in the hands of God," the prisoner replied.

The following year, Clark went to England with Williams in regard to the Coddington matter in Rhode Island, and, while there, published his account of the treatment the Baptists had met with in Massachusetts. As so often before, the

[1. John Clark, "Ill Newes from New England" (London, 1652), in Mass. Hist. Soc. Coll., Series IV, vol. II, p. 33.]

[2. Ibid., p. 47.]

[3. The Court that passed the sentences was composed of the magistrates only. Palfrey’s far-fetched theory, that the whole affair was engineered by Clark in order to acquire a grievance to be used in England later, has no foundation whatever in any contemporary conjecture, and in any case would not alter in the slightest the facts so far as Massachusetts is concerned. It is of interest only as showing to what lengths that colony’s clerical historians have gone in their efforts to defend in New England everything which they condemn in old England, and to treat the Massachusetts settlers as saints instead of very human Englishmen of the seventeenth century. Palfrey, History, vol. II, pp. 350, 354.]

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intolerance of the new country was severely criticized by its friends in the old.[1] "It doth not a little grieve my spirit," wrote Saltonstall to Cotton and Wilson, "what sadd things are reported dayly of your tyranny and persecution in New England. . . . These rigid wayse have layd you very lowe in the hearts of the saynts. I doe assure I have heard them pray in the publique assemblies that the Lord would give you meeke and humble spirits, not to stryve soe much for uniformity as to keepe the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." He warns them "not to practice those courses in a wilderness, which you went so farre to prevent"; and adds, "I hope you doe not assume to yourselves in fall ibillities of judgment, when the most learned of the Apostles confesseth he knew but in parte."[2]

In Cotton’s reply, the ministers defended the acts of the Court, and, speaking of the victims’ imprisonment, Cotton even descended so low as to write, "I believe they neither of them fared better at home, and I am sure Holmes had not been so well clad of many years before." More interesting, however, is his plain enunciation of the doctrine that they alone knew the will of God and should lay it down for the community, which we noted in an earlier chapter as one of the outstanding characteristics of Puritanism in every age. "There is a vast difference," he wrote, "between men’s inventions and God’s institutions; we fled from men’s inventions, to which we else should have been compelled; we compel none to men’s inventions." The inference was, of course, that, whatever the rest of mankind might think, any institution decreed by the Massachusetts ministers was, ipso facto, God’s. Therefore, "if the worship be lawful in itself, the magistrate compelling him to come to it, compelleth him not to sin, but the sin is in his own will that needs to be compelled to a Christian duty."[3] Four fifths of their fellow citizens might refuse to join their churches; the noblest spirits among

[1. Cf. Chap. II, supra.]

[2. Hutchinson, Papers, vol. II, pp. 127 ff.; Backus, Baptists, vol. I, pp. 198 f.]

[3. Hutchinson, Papers, vol. II, pp. 131 f.]

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the Puritan element in England might plead with them; but in vain. The theocracy had now reached such a height of intellectual pride, of intolerable belief in themselves as the sole possessors of the knowledge of God, and as the only legitimate interpreters of his will to the world, that either all freedom of thought in Massachusetts must die, or their power must be destroyed. In that struggle, the ministers and the magistrates were willing to shed unlimited blood. Fortunately, noble men and women were not lacking to offer themselves as victims that the liberty of God might be made manifest.

The two who had dared to take Obadiah Holmes by the hand, as, streaming with blood, he left the stake, were the silent witnesses of a great body of liberal opinion. While the ministers and magistrates were, of course, supported everywhere by very considerable numbers among the narrower and more zealous members of the churches, many causes were at work to reduce their proportion in relation to the community at large. Not only had the body of non-church members always constituted the great majority of the population, but even among the members themselves a new generation was growing up, which had known nothing of the spiritual experiences in England, and the struggle there against the established Church. Such a struggle, as the Massachusetts authorities were soon to find in the case of the Quakers, serves to intensify the zeal of the innovators. But in Massachusetts, the former innovators had become transformed into thoroughly orthodox members of a state church, supported by the arm of the civil power, enjoying all the comfortable, safe, and deadening results of an "establishment." Their faith being no longer tried by opposition, the inevitable consequence was a decline in interest and in zeal. This was recognized by the ministers, and the rather curious situation resulted, in which we find them adopting an apparently more liberal attitude than the lay members themselves toward the question of admission to membership. If, however, in the ministerial convention of 1657 and the synod of 1662, the clergy were rather the more anxious of the two to effect a compromise on

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that point,[1] the cause is not far to seek. Their power and influence-- and it must always be remembered that they thought they were using both for the work of the Lord--were dependent upon the maintenance of the numbers of the Church, quite as much as upon that of strict conformity and discipline. The theocracy was, in fact, in very unstable equilibrium, and was equally in danger from an increase in toleration or from a decrease in church-membership. It was the preservation of their influence, from high motives as well as from low, which was leading the clergy on the path to the "Half-Way Covenant"; and the fact that they felt the need of lowering the requirements for admission to the church is the strongest sort of evidence as to the extent to which liberal opinion had developed among the mass of laymen.

If, however, the clergy were to make the attempt, on the one hand, to prevent the numbers of their followers from declining, by no longer requiring them to have passed through the experience of conversion, on the other, they were about to engage in the most determined effort yet made to enforce conformity in matters of doctrine.

Of all the sects that had arisen during the religious ferment following the Reformation, none seems to have been more misunderstood or to have encountered greater opposition than the Quakers. In the middle of the seventeenth century, both the beliefs and the practices of the sect were in an inchoate state, and the vagaries of many of its adherents from the lower walks of life seem not only to have called forth unparallelled torrents of abuse from all quarters, but to have made men fear that these inoffensive people were to repeat the excesses of some of the frenzied sects of a century earlier. These fears and prejudices were largely increased by the writings of various ministers, many of whom were closely connected with New England.[2]

Both the ideas and the carriage of the Quakers were such

[1. Walker, Creeds, pp. 244 ff.]

[2. For example, Francis Higginson, Thomas Welde, Samuel Eaton, Christopher Marshall. Jones, Quakers, p. 29.]

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as to be especially repugnant to the leaders of the theocracy in Massachusetts. Their democratic tendency and peculiarities of social usage were extremely offensive to persons who regarded themselves as an aristocracy of the Saints of God, and who looked upon any lack of respect offered to magistrates or ministers as little short of blasphemy. Moreover, religion as professed by the Quakers was at the opposite pole of thought and experience from that professed by the Puritans. The latter looked upon the Bible as the only complete and final revelation of God to man, of which the minister was the official expounder. To them, the covenant between man and God, the preaching of the word, the scrupulous observance of the Sabbath and of the letter of the Judaic laws, the hard- won privilege of receiving the Sacrament, were all of the essence of religion. On the other hand, the Quakers laid special stress upon the divine illumination in the individual heart, and upon a continuing revelation of Himself by God to man. They denied to the Bible the position assigned to it by the Puritans, and were bitter in their denunciations of "a hireling ministry." To them the sacraments were shadows, while their lives were saturated with the spirit of the New Testament, not the Old. It was in this antithesis that lay the real answer to George Bishop’s question to the Massachusetts magistrates, when he asked: "Why was it that the coming of two women so shook ye, as if a formidable army had invaded your borders?"[1]

Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, the two women in question, arrived at Boston, from Barbadoes, in July, 1656, a few weeks after Ann Hibbens had been hung as a witch.[2] Governor Endicott was away at the time, but the Deputy Governor, Bellingham, took charge of the proceedings which were immediately begun against them. Their baggage was searched, and a hundred volumes, considered heretical, were confiscated and burned, without compensation. Although there was nothing about their case to suggest witchcraft, the authorities had

[1. George Bishop, New England Judged by the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1703), p. 2.]

[2. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, p. 269.]

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them stripped stark naked and examined for evidences, with unnecessary indignities.[1] They were imprisoned, deprived of light in their cell, and refused communication with anyone. Finally, after five weeks of this illegal punishment, they were shipped back to Barbadoes, fortunate in having escaped before Endicott’s return.

Within a few days of their leaving, eight more Quakers arrived on a ship from London, and were promptly accorded similar treatment, except that witchcraft was not charged.[2] Endicott’s attitude was shown at once. "Take heed you break not our Ecclesiastical Laws," he said to them, "for then ye are sure to stretch by a Halter." At the trial, when they asked for a copy of the laws against them, he refused to allow them to see one-- "to the grieving of the People then present," wrote our contemporary authority, "who said openly in the Court--How shall they know then when they Transgress?"3 After some weeks’ confinement, they were shipped back to England, and the Massachusetts authorities addressed a letter to the United Colonies, asking for the passage of a general regulation against allowing "such pests" as Quakers to be admitted to any of the colonies.[4] In October, the Massachusetts General Court passed the first law specifically directed against the sect, which provided that any master of a ship bringing a known Quaker to Massachusetts should be fined L100, and be required to give bonds for taking such out of the colony again, in default of which he was to be imprisoned. The Quaker was to be committed to the "house of correction," to be severely whipped, "kept constantly to worke," and not permitted to speak with anyone. If any resident of the colony defended any Quaker opinion, he was to be fined or, on

[1. Bishop, New England Judged, pp. 4 f., 12; Swarthmore Collection, vol. I, p. 66, cited in Jones, Quakers, p. 28 n. One of the curious elements in the psychology of the Puritans was their morbid interest in the most indecent sexual matters. One may find the details of a similar physical examination set forth by Winthrop, and the pages of his journal, as those of Bradford, the records of colonies and towns, the letters of clergymen, etc., all contain minute accounts of matters which today would find their place only in a limited class of medical textbooks.]

[2. Richard Smith also arrived from Long Island, being deported thither again.]

[3. Bishop, New England Judged, p. 10.]

[4. Acts United Colonies, vol. II, p. 156.]

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the third offense, banished; while any person "reviling" a magistrate or minister, which meant criticizing them, was to be fined or whipped.[1] Few bits of legislation can be more complete than this, which thus provided punishment for an offender, denied, anyone the right to speak in his behalf, and made it a crime to criticize the men who had passed the law. One voice, nevertheless, was publicly raised on behalf of liberty. Nicholas Upshall, "a weakly old man," who, when the two Quakeresses were being starved in prison, had bribed the jailer to give them food, heard the new law being proclaimed in the streets. He protested against it, and for his temerity in daring to criticize the magistrates, he was fined L20, and banished at the beginning of winter.[2] On his way to free Rhode Island, he was offered a home by an Indian who took pity upon him, and who, after hearing of his misfortune, exclaimed, "What a God have the English who deal so with one another about the worship of their God!"3 a Upshall, however, continued his journey to Gorton’s settlement, where he was welcomed and cared for.

The following year, a band of Quaker missionaries from England landed at Newport, and were kindly received by the Rhode Islanders.[4] This at once aroused the other colonies, whose Commissioners wrote to the Rhode Island government of the "prudent care" that Massachusetts had taken when Quakers had sought her hospitality, and requested that government to banish such Quakers as were already on the Island, and to prohibit any more from coming, so that the "contagion" might not spread. The letter ended with the threat that, if the little colony did not take such action, "wee apprehend that it will be our duty seriously to consider what further provision God may call us to make to prevent the aforesaid mischiefe."[5]

To this bullying letter, Rhode Island sent an answer as wise as it was dignified. After stating their desire to live in loving correspondence with all the colonies, they wrote: --

[1. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 277 f.]

[2. Ibid., pp. 279 f.]

[3. Bishop, New England Judged, p. 40.]

[4. Jones, Quakers, pp. 45 ff.]

[5. Acts United Colonies, vol. II, pp. 180 f.]

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"As concerning these quakers (so called), which are now among us, we have no law among us, whereby to punish any for only declaring by words, & c., theire mindes and understandings concerning the things and ways of God, as to salvation and an eternal condition. And we, moreover, finde, that in those places where these people aforesaid, in this colony, are most of all suffered to declare themselves freely, and are only opposed by arguments in discourse, there they least of all desire to come, and we are informed that they begin to loath this place for that they are not opposed by the civill authority, but with all patience and meekness are suffered to say over their pretended revelations and admonitions, nor are they like or able to gain many here to their way; surely we find that they delight to be persecuted by civill powers, and when they are soe, they are like to gain more adherents by the conseyte of their patient sufferings, than by consent to their pernicious sayings: And yet we conceive, that theire doctrines tend to very absolute cuttinge downe and overturninge relations and civill government among men, if generally received."[1]

The General Assembly sent a similar reply, some months later, in which they stated that freedom of conscience was the principal ground of their charter, "which freedom we still prize as the greatest hapiness that men can possess in this world"; and added that Quakers were "suffered to live in England; yea even in the heart of the nation."[2] Apparently the only answer the United Colonies could make to the worldly wisdom and nobility of their little neighbor, was to threaten to cut off her trade and to deprive her of the necessities of life.[3] Nor has the letter, which is one of the landmarks in the struggle for religious liberty in America, fared better at the hands of New England’s clerical historians. Palfrey, who devotes thirty-five pages to an extenuating account of the Massachusetts persecution, conceals Rhode Island’s stand in a footnote; and Dr. Ellis speaks of that colony’s protest as "a quaint letter," in which, incredibly, he finds only "naivete and humor."[4]

[1. R. I. Records, vol. X, pp. 376 f.]

[2. Ibid., I, pp. 378 ff.]

[3. Ibid., pp. 396 ff.]

[4. Palfrey, History, vol. II, p. 472 n.; Ellis, Puritan Age, pp. xvii, 457.]

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Meanwhile, the other four colonies proceeded to pass more stringent laws themselves, though those of Plymouth and Connecticut were less severe than those of New Haven, where the penalties rose to branding the letter H on the hands of male Quakers, and boring the tongues of Quakeresses with a red-hot iron.[1] This latter punishment, as well as the cutting off of ears, was likewise added to the Massachusetts laws.[2] In 1658, the Commissioners of the United Colonies "seriously comended" to the several colonies that they pass legislation declaring that, if any Quaker, once banished, returned, the offender should suffer death.[3] Massachusetts, however, which was clearly behind the suggestion, was the only colony that did so. Connecticut, which was lenient in its treatment, had but little trouble, and Governor Winthrop of that colony told the Massachusetts magistrates that he would go down on his bare knees to beg that they would not execute the death-penalty. Plymouth was more influenced by its powerful neighbor, and one of the magistrates, deposed for his toleration of the sect, wrote of the persecution in Massachusetts, "we expect that we must do the like, we must dance after their Pipe; now Plymouth-Saddle is upon the Bay-Horse."[4]

In spite of a petition signed by twenty-five names, which was presented to the General Court in Boston, asking for severer laws against the Quakers, [5] and which was probably inspired by the Reverend John Norton, there was a strong sentiment in the colony against such action. The cruel sufferings that the authorities by this time had inflicted upon Mary Dyer, Mary Clark, Christopher Holden, the Southwicks, Richard Dowdney, and many others, and their patience under affliction, were telling heavily in favor of the Quakers and

[1. Plymouth Col. Records, vol. XI, pp. 100, 101, 125, and passim; Conn. Col. Records, vol. I, pp. 283 f[.], 303, 308; New Haven Records, vol. II, pp. 217, 238 ff.; Bishop, New England Judged, pp. 160 ff., 203 ff., 226 ff.]

[2. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 308 f.]

[3. Acts United Colonies, vol. II, p. 212. John Winthrop, of Connecticut, signed with the notation: "looking art the last as a query and not as an Act; I subscribe."]

[4. Letter from Cudworth, in New England a degenerate Plant (London, 1659), p. 16.]

[5. Massachusetts Archives, cited by R. P. Hallowell, The Quaker Invasion of Massachusetts (Boston, 1887), pp. 153 ff.]

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against the clergy.[1] In the case of William Brend, the people became so aroused as temporarily to frighten the authorities in their mad course. He had been put "into Irons, Neck and Heels, lockt so close together, as there was no more room between each, than for the Horse-Lock that fastened them on"; and was kept in that way for sixteen hours, without food, after having been whipped. The next day he was whipped again with a tarred rope, so severely that the rope untwisted; but a new one was procured, and he was given ninety-seven more blows. "His Flesh was beaten Black, and as into a Gelly; and under his Arms the bruised Flesh and Blood hung down, clodded as it were in Baggs." The next morning, after threatening to give him more, the Puritan jailer went to church. Brend, who had then been some days without food, finally became unconscious. The people, learning the facts, protested loudly, and a tumult was raised. Endicott sent "his Chyrurgion, to see what might be done (such Fear was fallen upon you," writes our authority, "lest ye should suffer for his Blood) who thought it impossible according unto Men that he should live, but that his Flesh would Rot from off his Bones, ere that bruised Flesh could be brought to digest (this was the judgment of your Governors Chirurgion), and such a cry was made by the People that came in to see him, that ye were constrained, for the satisfaction of them, to set up a Paper at your Meeting-House-Door, and up and down the Streets, That the Jaylor should be dealt withal the next Court; but it was soon taken down again, upon the instigation of John Norton (your High-Priest unto whom, as the Fountain or Principal, most of the Cruelty and Bloodshed herein rehearsed, is to be imputed) and the Jaylor let alone: For, said John Norton (but how Cruelly let the Sober judge)--W. Brend endeavored to beat our Gospel-Ordinances black and blue; and if he was beaten black and blue, it was just upon him; and said he would appear in the Jaylor’s behalf."[2]

It is not intended to go into all the details of the many other and, happily, somewhat less terrible cases of the persecution;

[1. Bishop, New England judged, pp. 47-62.]

[2. Ibid., p. 67.]

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and the above extract from a contemporary has been given because the grim realities of the past are apt to be blurred by our easy modern phrases.

The Reverend John Norton, the Reverend Charles Chauncey, and other divines, as well as the Governor and other leading laymen, continued to press for a law allowing them to execute the death-penalty legally. The struggle, as usual, ranged the people against the theocratical leaders, and the deputies refused to pass the law prepared by the clergy and voted by the magistrates, which not only imposed death upon any Quaker who should return after banishment, but denied the right of trial by jury, and relegated the cases to a court composed of three magistrates, a majority of whom could impose the penalty.[1] The House of Deputies, which contained twenty-six members, finally consented to the passage of the law, somewhat amended, by a majority of one, owing to the absence, on account of illness, of one of those who had opposed the bill.[2] In view of the severe penalties imposed upon all who might speak in defense of Quaker doctrines, the thirteen who stood out to the end deserve all praise.

Immediate steps were taken to influence public opinion in favor of the new law, and Norton was appointed by the Court to write a treatise in support of it, which was published the following year.[3] Meanwhile, the persecution continued unabated. At the same court at which the law was passed, six Quakers were banished on pain of death, and four months later, the children of two of them, Daniel and Provided Southwick,

[1. Bishop, New England Judged, p. 101.]

[2. Ibid., p. 102. The law is in Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 345 ff.]

[3. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, p. 348; also, The Heart of New England rent at the Blasphemies of the present Generation; Cambridge, 1659. The liberty of conscience which the more liberal part of the community was striving for he denounced as liberty "to answer the dictates of the errors of Conscience in walking contrary to Rule. It is a liberty to blaspheme, a liberty to seduce others from the true God. A liberty to tell lies in the name of the Lord" (p. 51). We may note here that several New England historians, as one of the defenses of Massachusetts, lay stress upon the vituperative language employed by the Quakers. As a matter of fact, none found in the contemporary records at all equals that of the Puritans, the violence of whose language is open for any to read in their legislative enactments and state documents. Many remarks addressed by officers of the Puritan courts, from Endicott down, to their helpless prisoners, could be expressed in modern books only by a series of dashes.]

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were ordered sold into bondage in Virginia or the West Indies, by the County Treasurer, to pay the accumulated fines imposed upon them for not attending a Puritan church. No ship’s captain, however, sufficiently hardened in the religion of New England could be found to share in the guilt of this transaction.[1] There is no need of going into the details of the other cases, which were soon overshadowed by those of the martyrs who voluntarily suffered the extreme penalty, in order to testify to the truth as they saw it, and to die for liberty of opinion.

There is no doubt that Mary Dyer, William Robinson, and Marmaduke Stevenson had counted the full cost when they returned from banishment to face certain death, in the autumn of 1659. Sentence was pronounced on the eighteenth of October, and the execution took place a few days later.[2] On the petition of her son, Mary Dyer had been reprieved, and was once more banished; but with a fiendish ingenuity of cruelty, she was not to know of it, and was to be led to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to wait while the two men were being hung. As they were led to execution, the three walked hand in hand. "Are you not ashamed to walk between two young men?" asked the Puritan marshal, with characteristic coarseness. "It is an hour of the greatest joy I can enjoy in this world," answered the pure-hearted woman. "No eye can see, no ear can hear, no tongue can speak, no heart can understand, the sweet incomes and refreshing of the spirit of the Lord which I now enjoy."[3] After the others had died, her hands and legs were bound, her face covered, and the rope adjusted around her neck. At that moment her reprieve was announced to her. She refused to accept her life, but was taken to Rhode Island by her family. The following spring, however, she returned and told the General Court that she was to bear witness against the unjust law, which this time was allowed to take its course.[4] A few months later,

[1. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 349, 367, 366; Bishop, New England Judged, p. 107.]

[2. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 383 f.]

[3. Bishop, New England Judged, p. 134.]

[4. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, p. 419.]

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another Quaker, William Leddra, suffered the same penalty. So far, in the Puritan colonies, mainly in Massachusetts, over forty had been whipped, sixty-four imprisoned, over forty banished, one branded, three had had their ears cut off, five had had the right of appeal to England denied them, four had been put to death, while many others had suffered in diverse ways.[1]

There are many contemporary evidences, however, to show that the sympathy of the people went out more and more to the victims. At the time of the execution of Robinson and Stevenson, a heavy guard had been necessary to allow the sentence to be carried out, and the Court had found it needful to prepare a long defense of their action against such as might feel "pitty and comiseration," and others who might look upon the magistrates as "bloody persecutors." Apologetic broadsides were printed to the same effect.[2]

While the trial of Leddra was in progress, a banished Quaker, Wenlock Christison, suddenly appeared in court, and after declaring his identity, looked into the stern face of Endicott, and solemnly said to him, "I am come here to warn you that you should shed no more innocent blood, for the blood that you have shed already, cries to the Lord for vengeance to come upon you."[3] He was immediately arrested, and at his trial protested that the colony had no authority to make laws repugnant to the laws of England, and that there was no law there providing for capital punishment against Quakers. But by this time even the magistrates had begun to hesitate in their course, and several refused to vote for his death. Endicott, in a fury, pounded the table, and ordered another vote, thundering out, "You that will not consent, record it: I thank God I am not afraid to give judgment." It is said that the result was uncertain, and that the Governor himself precipitately passed the sentence of death.[4]

[1. Besse, Abstract of the Sufferings, etc., cited by Jones, Quakers, pp. 91 ff.]

[2. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. I, pp. 384 ff; Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, Series III, vol. II, p. 203.]

[3. W. Sewel, History of the Quakers (New York, 1844), vol. I, p. 338.]

[4. Ibid., p. 344; Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 20.]

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The sentence, however, was never executed. Not only had the people of Massachusetts now risen in revolt against the persecuting tyranny of the ministers and magistrates, but the colony was to be stayed in its course by a stronger power. The English monarchy had been restored a year before, and the relations of Massachusetts to the mother-country were about to undergo a marked change.

Complaints had been made to King Charles of the persecutions in New England, and word of this had been received privately in Massachusetts. Partly from fear of his possible action, and partly in deference to the evident opposition of the people, a new law was passed, which, while still preserving the death-penalty, evidently intended to make it less necessary of enforcement.[1] Under this new act, Christison and twenty-seven others were released from prison, though two were stripped to the waist, and whipped through the town.[2]

On receiving news of Leddra’s death, Edward Burroughs an English Quaker, had secured an audience with the King, and told him that "there was a vein of innocent blood opened in his dominions, which if it were not stopped would overrun all"; to which the monarch answered, "but I will stop that vein." His secretary was called, and an order at once prepared to be sent to the Massachusetts government. As no royal ship was then sailing, the Quakers hired one and dispatched the "king’s missive," by Samuel Shattuck, a banished Massachusetts Quaker. In six weeks, the condemned man, now a King’s messenger, confronted Endicott, and delivered the letter, ordering that no further proceedings be taken against Quakers, and that such as were under charges be sent to England. Endicott read it, and with what must have been the most painful emotion of his life, he looked at the hated heretic and said, "We shall obey his Majesty’s commands."[3] Orders were issued for the release of all Quakers, and Shattuck,

[1. Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680, p. 312; Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 24.]

[2. Sewel, Quakers, vol. I, p. 345; Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 24.]

[3. The account is From Sewel, Quakers, vol. I, pp. 345 ff. The letter has often been reprinted. Cf. Jones, Quakers, p. 98; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-68, pp. 55 f.]

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speaking of the colonists, said that "many mouths are now opened, which were before shuts, and some of them now say, Its the welcomest ship that ever came into the land."[1]

Though no more of the sect were put to death, their persecution was by no means ended. The new law had provided that every Quaker should be apprehended, stripped from the waist up, tied to a cart’s tail, and whipped through every town to the boundary of the colony. This was to be repeated if they returned, and on the fourth offense they were to be branded, and, on the fifth, banished on pain of death.[2] This law was modified by limiting the whippings to three towns only, in 1662, although an answer to the address of Massachusetts to the King had been received some months earlier, withdrawing much of the royal protection formerly offered to the Quakers.[3] The change was evidently due, therefore, to public sentiment in the colony. Of the barbarous treatment accorded the victims under the act, it is unnecessary to speak in detail. To mention one of the worst cases, we may note that three women were stripped to the waist, tied to the cart’s tail, and, in the end of December, forced to tramp through deep snow, receiving ten lashes on their bare backs in eleven successive towns.[4] The end, however, was not far off. In 1665, Endicott

[1. The laws were temporarily suspended. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 34. A popular ballad, supposed to have been written about 1676, is interesting, not only for its confirmation of other contemporary sources as to where the blame rested, but as showing the popular feeling.

But may we know the Counsellors that brought our Rulers in, To be so guilty as they are, of the aforesaid sin? They were the tribe of Ministers, as they are said to be, Who always to our Magistrates, must be the eyes to see. . . . . . And I am not alone herein, there’s many hundreds more That have for many Years ago spoke much upon that Score.

Peter Folger, "A Looking Glass for the Times"; S. S. Rider, R. I. Tracts, Series V, vol. XVI, pp. 6, 12.]

[2. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, pp. 2 ff.]

[3. Ibid., pp. 59, 164 ff.; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-1668, p. 94[.]

[4. The modern reader may find cases and references in Jones, Quakers, pp. 101 ff.]

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died, and the Royal Commissioners also commanded the Massachusetts General Court not to molest Quakers in their secular business.[1]

Although a considerable body of opinion had, undoubtedly, been throughout in favor of the course taken by the ministers and magistrates,[2] all the evidence points to a large and increasing body against it. The facts that the deputies were opposed to it, that the Court, usually somewhat arrogant in the assertion of its authority, had to stoop to public explanations and propaganda, that even the magistrates finally revolted, and that in the last case, the death-penalty could not be enforced even when passed, all indicate clearly enough the refusal of the people to follow their ministers in their frantic efforts to maintain orthodoxy at any cost.

It is needless to say that the seventeenth century cannot be judged by the standards of the nineteenth, but the second half of the earlier one was by no means as intolerant as many would have us believe. Opinion in England and in all of the colonies, although naturally bigoted as yet, on the part of many, was, beyond question, becoming far more liberal. We have already noted the frequent remonstrances addressed to Massachusetts by her friends at home. We have seen the consistent stand of Rhode Island from the start, and noted the tolerant tendencies in Plymouth and Connecticut. In England, Vane was raising his voice in Parliament for religious liberty in its most extreme form.[3] In the same body, Cromwell was asking, "Is it ingenuous to ask liberty and not to give it? What greater hypocrisy than for those who were opposed by the Bishops to become the greatest oppressors themselves, as soon as their yoke was removed."[4] Maryland had possessed religious freedom for all professing Christ, since 1649, and in 1665 the New Jersey Concession provided for complete liberty of conscience, as did the charter of South Carolina four years

[1. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 212.]

[2. Cf., e.g., the petition of the inhabitants of Dover in 1662 against the increase of Quakers. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 69.]

[3. Burton’s Diary, cited by Hosmer, Young Sir Harry Vane, p. 501.]

[4. Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (London, n.d.), p. 94.]

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later.[1] In Jamaica, toleration, with full civil liberties to all Christians, including Quakers, was proclaimed in 1662.[2] Public opinion notoriously outruns legislation, yet in addition to the above examples and others, Pennsylvania, in 1682, provided in its laws for equal liberty for all who believed in God; while the Toleration Act, a landmark in the struggle in England, was passed seven years later.[3]

The progress made in the generation since Bradford and his little band had tried to flee secretly from England had been great. A large section of the people, however, both at home and in the colonies, was undoubtedly as bigoted and intolerant as ever; and, unfortunately, the leaders in charge of the destinies of the largest of the New England colonies at the critical period we have been describing were numbered among them. They had made a desperate stand, and hesitated at nothing,--not even inflicting torture and taking human life,--in order to maintain their position; and, happily for America, they had been defeated, though not until they had set an indelible stain on the pages of American history.

The struggle we have been describing has not been related at length because of its antiquarian or dramatic interest. In toleration of opinions lies the one hope for the advancement of the human race. If the earthly end of man "is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole,"4 free scope must be provided for differing opinion, and varieties in the experiment of living. The contest in Massachusetts happened to be fought out on religious lines, because it was an age of religious interests. It happened to be fought against the ministers and magistrates because, in that time and place, they represented the forces opposed to freedom and to change. But there are other elements in man’s nature than religion; and tyranny and opposition to all innovation may be as securely enthroned in the public opinion of a

[1. Macdonald, Select Charters (New York, 1906), pp. 142, 165.]

[2. Cal. State Pap., Col., 1661-1668, p. 111.]

[3. H. H. Russell Smith, Theory of Religious Liberty in the Reigns of Charles II and James II (Cambridge University press, 1911), pp. 53, 1 ff.]

[4. Humboldt; cited by J. S. Mill, On Liberty (Oxford), p. 71.]

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democracy as in the leaders of a theocracy. So far as experience has shown, they are certain to be, in a socialistic or communistic state; and the battle for toleration of opinion, for the liberty of the individual personality to expand along its own unique lines, for the chance of any further development in the possibilities for the advancement of the race, may have to be fought out again upon a grander scale than any the world has yet seen.

That the course which the Massachusetts authorities took was wholly unnecessary was proved by the events in the other colonies. What happened was largely the consequence of their own acts. Rhode Island had shown the just, and, at the same time, the wise course to pursue. As she pointed out, wherever Quakers were not persecuted, they gave no trouble. One of the glories of the present nation is its complete toleration, in so far, at least, as religion is concerned; and its hard-won liberty is in no small measure due to the people of its smallest state, and to the noble men and women who suffered and gave their lives that the power of the Massachusetts theocracy might be broken, and the human mind unshackled. The debt which, in other ways, America owes to the largest of the Puritan colonies is too great to require that aught but the truth be told. It is not necessary to exalt erring and fallible men to the rank of saints in order to show our gratitude to them or our loyalty to our country. But the leaders and citizens of Rhode Island, the martyred Quakers, and the men and women of Massachusetts and the other colonies, who so lived and wrought and died that the glory of an heritage of intellectual freedom might be ours, are the Americans whom, in the struggle we have been reciting, it should be our duty to honor.

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IN the last chapter we mentioned the change that was to take place in the relations between New England and the mother-country in the years following the Restoration. That change was one of practical politics rather than of theory, which latter had been but little altered from the beginning of the colonial settlement, although the exigencies of events in England had largely prevented its being translated into a consistent course of action. In order to understand the imperial theory of the day, and to appraise the wisdom and justice of the positions taken both by England and by her colonies, it is necessary to shift our standpoint temporarily, and to study the empire from its centre, and not from one of its less important outposts. Business men in contact with large affairs are familiar with the relations that exist between the central administrative office of a great corporation--whose sources of raw materials, producing plants, and selling agencies may be scattered over half a continent--and the local manager of one of its units. If we consult the latter, we may learn of local conditions as they affect him, and, perhaps, of his grievances against the policy of the corporation; but if we would properly understand the whole situation, we must study it at the centre of the entire complicated system.

The New England colonies were but parts, and, at this period, unimportant parts, of such a system. Not only can their history not be understood, if we attempt to trace it without reference to England, but neither can their relations with that country, unless we take the entire colonial organization into account. The colonies were not independent states.[1]

[1. Cf. W. MacDonald, "A neglected Point of View in American Colonial History," American Historical Association Report, 1902, vol. I, pp. 171 ff.]

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They were not even, primarily, independent states in the making. The fact that a few of them, which happened to have a continent at their back and unlimited room for expansion, revolted after a century and a half, has tended to obscure their real contemporary relation to England, much as the refraction of water alters the apparent position of objects under it when seen from an angle. The angle from which we Americans always look at the original colonies is that of our present independent nation; but by doing so we unwittingly shift their position from integral parts of a complicated imperial system to incipient independent commonwealths, assumed to have been unjustly held in thraldom. Needless to say, such a viewpoint vitiates our appraisal of every contemporary act and opinion. It is possible that after some hundreds of years the present United States may be divided into two or more nations; but to-day they form one system, and no one would think of interpreting the present relations between North and South, or East and West, in the light of a possible separation centuries hence. In the same way, the relations between England and her colonies in the seventeenth century should be interpreted in the light of their then actual and prospective union and the political theories current, and not in that of a subsequent, and more or less accidental, separation, and of the wholly different theories of a later age.[1]

When James I ascended the throne of England, the British Empire was not in existence. The map of the world would have been searched in vain for any settlement of English men on English soil outside of the British Isles. When, less than half a dozen decades later, the third Stuart returned from "his travels," amidst the acclaims of the nation, it was to become the head of an empire which already encircled the

[1. I speak of the separation as accidental, not because the forces then at work did not make it almost inevitable, but because altered economic theories and scientific discoveries, the latter largely eliminating the extremely important elements, in the original problem, of time and distance, occurred a half-century after the separation took place. Had they occurred sooner, they might have prevented it, as they have been largely instrumental in holding the remainder of the empire together and greatly adding to it. The influence of free-trade, steam, and electricity has been of vast importance in imperial politics.]

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globe. From Newfoundland to the Caribbean, English colonies stretched in a great arc upon islands and mainland, while the Bermudas, equidistant, roughly speaking, from all its parts, formed a strategic centre far out in the Atlantic. Across that ocean, Fort Comantine on the coast of Guinea protected the African slave-trade, and the fortified island of St. Helena was a half-way station for the Indian fleets. Passing around the Cape, the next English possession was Gombroon, on the Persian Gulf; while, still farther east, in India, lay the factories on the Madras and Bombay shores and the Bay of Bengal. Beyond those, again, English traders were permanently established on Sumatra, Java, and the Celebes. Such an imperial structure could not have been raised in less than the allotted three-score years and ten of individual life by a practice wholly tyrannical, or a colonial theory wholly false.

The great trans-oceanic empires which were attempted in the seventeenth century by the leading European powers were political phenomena of an absolutely new type. Neither the colonies of the city-states of Greece, nor the slow continental expansion of Rome offered any adequate parallel to the political results of the age of discovery, or any solutions of the problems created.[1] Of those new empires, the English not only has proved the most lasting and the greatest, but has secured, from its very beginning, the largest comparative amount of freedom to the colonists. Assertions have often been made that its development has been unintentional and unconscious; that the English race, as the phrase goes, has peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. This is true only in the sense that the Empire’s growth has been slow, normal, and unhurried, and that its strength has lain in the character of the people rather than in any consistent policy of aggression upon the part of their rulers. That it has been unconscious in the sense that it has been unobserved is, of course, disproved by the contemporary literature relating to imperial problems in almost every decade from the sixteenth

[1. Cf. E. A. Freeman, Greater Greece and Greater Britain, (London 1886); C. P. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Oxford, 1912).]

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century to the present day; while the wars of the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were largely caused by trade and colonial questions.[1]

Englishmen could not emigrate to distant parts of the world, and found settlements, without, in many and serious ways, involving the English nation--and that apart from the fact that the soil on which the most populous of the colonies grew up was the unquestioned property of the English Crown. From the very beginning of colonization, therefore, even before any permanent success had been achieved, we find the question being discussed as to what use, if any, to the English people were these distant settlements, with their possible disadvantages and certain responsibilities.[2]

If the establishment of the British Empire was not the result of absent- mindedness, neither was it prompted by motives of philanthropy toward generations yet unborn in countries overseas. Exploration, settlement, far- distant foreign trade, ensuing wars with competing powers, and the policing of trade-routes, were costly and hazardous matters, and not to be undertaken without the prospect of very tangible rewards of one sort or another. As we endeavored to show in an earlier chapter, the main underlying motive that led to the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, in the main, to the colonizing movements of the seventeenth, was economic. It was, therefore, entirely natural that the speculation as to the advantages and disadvantages of empire, and as to the relations of England to her dependencies, should be based upon the economic theories of the day. The question, moreover, as to what advantages, if any, would accrue from founding, or allowing to be founded, colonies not yet in existence, was almost necessarily, what those advantages would be for England herself. After the Empire had come into existence, the point of view shifted somewhat, and, theoretically, the question became one of what advantage a policy might prove to the Empire

[1. J. R. Seeley, Expansion of England (London, 1884), pp. 110 ff.]

[2. The beginnings of the discussion were noted in an earlier chapter. For the view at the end of the 19th century, cf. C. P. Lucas’s Introduction, in Lewis, Government of Dependencies (Oxford, 1891), pp. xlv ff.]

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as a whole, although, as its greatest aggregation of wealth and population, the source of protection, the seat of power, the centre of all exchanges, in a word, the heart of empire, the local interests of England would still outweigh those of any of the dependencies. In no case would those at the head of the imperial government, aside from selfish motives, of which there were plenty, have thought it the part of either wisdom or justice to uphold the citizens of any one colony in a course that seemed to run counter to the interests of the Empire as a whole.

We have already noted how the breaking up of the unity of Christendom by the development of state churches was but a phase of the operation of new forces at work, at the beginning of the modern era, which were moulding men’s thoughts and emotions along national lines. In their religious aspect, these gave rise to the post-Reformation churches, and in their political aspect, to the growth of the modern state. They were equally powerful in the economic field; and the so-called Mercantile Theory, which was the ground of the imperial theories of the time, was but the reasoned expression of this nationalizing of the economic life of the peoples. In the Middle Ages, the life of the individual, in its various relations, had been decentralized. In his political allegiance he had looked one way, in his religious another, and in his economic still another. The growing strength of the feeling of nationality was gradually drawing all toward a common centre.

The balance of trade, which forms one of the essential features of the Mercantile Theory, was not a new conception. It was, however, of great practical influence upon economic doctrine and state policies when applied to the nations. After speaking of how a merchant balances his private books, and how the head of a family looks after his estate, an early writer goes on to say that "the Royall Merchant, the Regall Father of that great family of a Kingdom, if He will know the Estate of his Kingdome, Hee will compare the Gaine thereof with the Expense; that is, the Native Commodities issued and sent out, with the Forraine Commodities received in; and if it

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appeare that the Forraine Commodities doe exceed the Native, either he must increase the Native, or lessen the Forraine, or else looke for nothing else, but the Decay of Trade and therein the losse of his Revenue, and Impoverishing of his People."[1]

This theory was developed into a system by Mun, who affirmed that the best method to "increase our wealth and treasure is by Forraign Trade, wherein wee must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value."[2] The effects of this doctrine were vastly increased and modified by the current belief that the precious metals constituted the real wealth of a kingdom, and that its whole trade, therefore, should be considered mainly in reference to the resultant balance with foreigners in gold and silver. For example, Mun states that if pepper be worth twenty pence in Amsterdam, and threepence in the East Indies, it is a gain to the nation to buy it in the latter, even though the freight and other charges make it cost more in England than if it were imported from Holland, because those charges are paid by Englishmen to Englishmen, so that only threepence in actual coin leaves the country, as compared with twenty. In this particular, he points out, his countrymen "must ever distinguish between the gain of the kingdom, and the profit of the Merchant."[3]

The effect of this theory upon the questions of colonization and colonial policy was profound. "I conceive, no forein Plantation should be undertaken or prosecuted," wrote Samuel Fortrey, "but in such countreys that may increase the wealth and trade of this nation, either in furnishing us, with what

[1. E. M[isselden], The Circle of Commerce or the Ballance of Trade (London, 1623) p. 131.

[2. Thomas Man, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade, 1664 (ed. New York, 1910) p. 7. Cf. J. R. McCulloch, A Short Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce (London, 1856), p. vi.]

[3. Mun, England’s Treasure, p. 14. In his defense of the East India Company, he advanced upon his predecessors in advocating the export of bullion, if, as a direct result, a larger amount could be shown to be imported. Cf. chaps. V and VI of his Considerations on the East India Trade (London, 1701); reprinted in Early English Tracts, pp. 1-49.]

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we are otherwise forced to purchase from strangers, or else by increasing such commodities, as are vendible abroad; which may both increase our shipping, and profitably employ our people; but otherwise, it is always carefully to be avoided, especially where the charge is greater than the profit, for we want not already a countrey sufficient for double our people, were they rightly employed; and a Prince is more powerfull that hath his strength and force united, then he that is weakly scattered in many places."[1] Granted the assumptions that real wealth consists only of the precious metals, and that, in a country without mines, these can be acquired only as a result of a favorable trade with strangers, the colonial theory of the European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was as logical as it was patriotic. The assumptions may have been wrong, but in this, as in so many other cases, we must remember that delusions are "as effective in social evolution as are unassailable facts."[2]

The pacte coloniale, therefore, was, in some of its aspects, similar to the ideal of the modern "trust," which would combine in one enormous organization the sources of its raw materials, its means of transportation, manufacturing plants, and selling agencies. The ideal empire, according to the Mercantile Theory, would embrace the home country, which, aside from the production of certain raw materials, was, in the main, the source of credit, the seat of manufactures, the selling agency to the world for the whole empire, the centre of administration, and the protective power to guard the system. The colonies in the temperate zone were to supply the typical products of their regions, the East and West Indies materials found in the tropics, and the African stations the supply of negro labor.

It must be distinctly remembered that this was not merely an English ideal. It was the end toward which the most advanced European nations were striving in building up their

[1. England’s Interest and Improvement, 1663; reprint, Johns Hopkins University, 1907. p. 35.]

[2. G. L. Beer, The Old Colonial System (New York, 1912), vol. I, p. 37.]

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empires according to what was then considered as unquestionably the soundest economic doctrine. France, under Colbert, was endeavoring, with a logical rigor that was not equaled by the English, to erect just such a completely balanced system. She, too, had her North American temperate- zone colony in Canada, her fishing fleets off Newfoundland, her West Indian possessions, her African supply in Senegal, and her factories in the East Indies.[1]

Such a system, closed against the world, presupposed that every part would be willing to subordinate itself to the theoretical needs of the whole, and that the production of every unit could be so nicely adjusted in nature and amount as to maintain the internal balances, and allow the home country, as the selling agency, to establish a favorable balance with the world external to the empire. Although some of the nations, notably England and France, were able to block out empires so located, as to their parts, as apparently to fulfil the requirements, no such perfect adjustment of colonial production could ever be reached as to fit the needs of the theory; while its logic, seemingly so perfect, left out of account the tact that the colonists were human beings, who would surely develop their own local interests, troubles, and aspirations, and not insensible parts of a great machine.

The English Empire was the most complete embodiment of the ideal. The factories in the Spice Islands and on the coasts of India supplied the products of the Orient, not to be obtained elsewhere. Africa provided the negroes, upon whose labor was based the production of sugar in the West Indies, which formed one of the mainstays of the Empire’s commerce. St. Helena and Bermuda were strategic points on the Indian and American trade- routes. Virginia and Maryland were wholly devoted to the staple crop of tobacco, which was another of the important elements in British trade. The fisheries of Newfoundland provided England with an article to exchange with the Catholic countries of southern Europe for the wine, salt, and other products imported from them; and they fitted in perfectly with

[1. Mims, Colbert’s West Indian Policy, pp. 8, 315, 319, 335.]

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the imperial scheme.[1] All these distant possessions, by employing an increasing amount of shipping, under the laws to be mentioned later, built up the merchant fleet upon which rested England’s naval power and her ability to defend the Empire; while all of them consumed English manufactured goods.

New England, however, did not fit into this elaborate and delicately adjusted trade-machine. In spite of her enormous forest-resources, which had been counted upon to provide the Empire with naval stores and timber, she failed utterly in competition with the countries on the Baltic.[2] Her agricultural products were practically identical with those of the old country, and so competed with them. There was no staple crop, like sugar or tobacco, to form an element of imperial commerce. Her fisheries, which had loomed so large at the time of the first settlement, served, for various reasons, only to compete with those of Newfoundland, and at once to reduce England’s profits and to retard the increase of her fishing fleet. The purely colonial shipping, which the New England colonies early produced, drew away English seamen, competed with English vessels, and reduced the naval strength of the mother country. Following the economic crisis of 1640, Massachusetts and her sister colonies made strenuous and partly successful efforts to establish home manufactures, which curtailed the market for English goods.[3] As, even then, those colonies imported much more from England than they exported to her, they had to seek an outlet for such products as were not adapted for the English trade, in order to obtain the money to settle their English bills. The West Indian colonies, on the other hand, exported to England far more than they imported. Consequently New England sold her timber and provisions to the island settlements, and used their bills of exchange to

[1. Beer, Old Colonial System, vol. I, pp. 319 ff.; Origins of the British Colonial System, p. 294; Osgood, American Colonies, pp. 111, 139 ff.]

[2. Efforts were continually made, however, to secure naval stores from her. Cf., under the Commonwealth, Cal. Slate Pap., Col., 1574-1660, pp. 392, 399.]

[3. Cf. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, pp. 29 f.; V. S. Clark, Manufacturing in the U. S., pp. 31, 34, 40, 50.]

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pay her English debts. In this, however, she seemed to be in part merely drawing away the trade-balance of the West Indies by increasing her competition with the home-country.[1] Nor, as the shrewd and thrifty New England merchants grew in numbers and in wealth, did the English West Indian islands afford them sufficient outlet for their commercial energies; and there gradually developed that system of trade with the French island-group which was to be one of the causes of the Revolution.[2]

When we add to this economic maladjustment, according to the current theory, the unique position of the New England colonies as chartered or practically independent governments, it is obvious how anomalous their relations were to the imperial scheme. From the standpoint of contemporary opinion, it was not unnatural that they should be regarded by many as "the unfortunate results of misdirected efforts." Nor was it merely that they failed to fit in with the rest of the Empire. As they grew in population, and in their avowed independence of all external control of any sort, many an Englishman must have felt the fear expressed by one of the ablest economic writers of the latter part of the Empire’s first century. Of all the American plantations, D’Avenant wrote in 1698, New England "is the most proper for building ships and breeding seamen, and their soil affords plenty of cattle; besides which, they have good fisheries, so that, if we should go to cultivate among them the art of navigation, and teach them to have a naval force, they may set up for themselves, and make the greatest part of our West-Indian Trade precarious," as well as absorbing the colonial carrying trade and merchandizing.[3] It has, indeed, been conjectured that Cromwell’s attempt, in 1665, to induce a large number of the New Englanders to emigrate to the newly conquered island of Jamaica derived directly from the failure of their colonies to fit into the mercantile

[1. Beer, Origins, pp. 268, 295 f.; Old Colonial System, vol. II, pp. 210, 221, 230 ff.]

[2. Mims, Colbert’s West Indian Policy, pp. 224 f.]

[3. C. D’Avenant, "On the Plantation Trade, 1698;" in his Discourses on the Public Revenue, etc. (London, 1771), vol. II, p. 9; Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, p. 430.]

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empire,[1] although, to the present writer, other economic and military motives seem quite as likely.[2]

From this theory of empire sprang certain practical corollaries. In part to avoid allowing foreigners to benefit from the imperial trade, and to retain the carrying profits within the Empire, but mainly to build up the merchant fleet, it was decreed that all goods must be transported in vessels belonging to the mother-country or her colonies. Foreign goods, according to the theory, would have to be excluded as far as possible from the colonial markets, the products of the latter limited to the English market, and colonial manufacturing restrained so as not to compete with home-made goods, although the theory was never fully translated into practice. On the other hand, as a partial offset to such laws as were passed, which mainly redounded to the benefit of England so far as their direct results were concerned, colonial produce was, to some extent, given preferential treatment in that country, and, in some important particulars, Englishmen were forbidden to compete with the colonists. The colonies were also afforded protection against the aggression of foreign nations. No colony could possibly have remained independent. The choice was not between the English Empire and independence, but between being subject to Protestant and, as the world went then, liberal England, or to Catholic France or Spain.

As we have already said, in the second half of the seventeenth century, Colbert, the great minister of Louis XIV, was applying the Mercantile doctrine to the upbuilding of the French overseas empire with a rigor that the English never attained. When he excluded all foreign vessels from the French colonial carrying-trade, there was, as yet, no sufficient French merchant fleet to serve colonial needs, and the West India

[1. New Haven Colonial Records, vol. I, p. 180; G. L. Beer, "Cromwell’s Policy in its Economic Aspects;" Political Science Quarterly, vol. XVI, p. 611.]

[2. The main idea seems to have been the peopling of the island with English--"from Nevis, St. Christopher’s, New England, or any of the other plantations in America." Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, pp. 450, 453. Cf. also F. Strong, "The Causes of Cromwell’s West Indian Expedition," American Historical Review, vol. IV, pp. 229 ff.; I. S., A brief and perfect Journal of the late proceedings and success, etc. (London, 1655), pp. 2 ff.; The Clarke Papers (Camden Society, 1899), pp. 203 ff.]

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planters were brought to the verge of starvation and ruin. If they "were hungry, barefooted and in rags," writes the historian of Colbert’s policy, "they must count these things as a bit of temporary suffering, to be endured for the upbuilding of French commerce. They must wait for the law of supply and demand to operate and bring them, sooner or later, an abundance from France. . . . But he was demanding too much. What meant the noble idea of restoring French commerce and the upbuilding of a mighty colonial empire to the planters in the West Indies, whose empty bellies were crying for food, whose nakedness demanded to be clothed?"1 Nor were the colonial measures of the other nations less repressive.[2] Both religious and economic interests, therefore, made it desirable that the English colonies should remain within the English Empire; and it was the power of England alone which enabled them to do so. For it was not a question, for example, of the sturdy New England settlers warding off attacks from the far fewer French inhabitants of Canada. No colony was self-supporting or economically self-contained. Cut off from access to the mother-country, deprived of her protection on the ocean trade-routes, they would inevitably wither and die, or be absorbed into one of the rival and less liberal empires.[3] The allegiance of the colonists of various nations was in only slight measure determined by their own comparative strengths, and almost wholly by the naval powers of the home countries.

Such, in brief outline, was the European theory of empire held during our colonial period, some of the main features in the practical application of which can be traced back for several

[1. Mims, Colbert’s West Indian Polity, p. 194.]

[2. Cf. Dutch prohibition of colonial manufactures, in Egerton, Origin and Growth of British Dominions, p. 118 n.; Beer, Old Colonial System, vol. I, p. 150, for Portuguese policy.]

[3. For an example of the work England did in policing the trade routes, cf. the case of the King David. Sailing from Newfoundland to Tangier, she met with Algerine pirates off Cape St. Vincent, whom she fought off in a three-days running fight. Later, meeting with "Five Pirats more," she was forced to surrender. A few days later, she was rescued by a ship of the English navy; but the two vessels meeting with "Six Pirats more," the King David was a second time captured, to be rescued once again some days later by another English ship, and safely escorted into Malaga. Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680, pp. xxxvi, 541.]

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centuries before ever the question of empire arose, as we have indicated in our earlier chapters.[1] The old life of the Middle Ages, which had been largely municipal, had become national. The extraordinary energy of the new period, facing an entire globe to be appropriated and exploited, rapidly developed national spirit into imperial ambition, and the old ideas and practices of a small and legally restricted commerce had to be suddenly adapted and enlarged to meet a situation unprecedented in history. The surprising fact is not that, in so many ways, the theory and practice of empire-making should have contained errors and worked injustices, but that one which, after all, proved highly successful, should have been developed so immediately and so surely.

Until comparatively recently, the Mercantile Theory was regarded as a sinister device to give play to the selfish profiteering of the English merchant-class. It is, however, coming more and more to be recognized as a necessary step in the evolution of the modern state. "What was at stake," writes Schmoller, who was the leader in these newer views, "was the creation of real political economies as unified organisms, the centre of which should be, not merely a state policy reaching out in all directions, but rather the living heart-beat of a united sentiment. Only he who thus conceives of mercantilism will understand it; in its innermost kernel it is nothing but state-making, not state-making in a narrow sense, but state- making and national-economy-making at the same time; state-making in the modern sense, which creates out of the political community an economic community, and so gives it a heightened meaning. The essence of the system," he adds, "lies not in some doctrine of money, or of the balance of trade; not in tariff barriers, protective duties, or navigation laws; but in something far greater, namely, in the total transformation of society and its organization, as well as of the state and its institutions; in the replacing of a local and territorial economic policy by that of the national state."[2]

Modern critics of the theory have been prone to lay stress

[1. Cf. also Osgood, American Colonies, vol. III, pp. 195 ff.]

[2. G. Schmoller, The Mercantile System and its historical Significance (New York, 1896), pp. 49 ff.]

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upon the obvious defects and shortcomings which appear in the workings of the enactments designed to translate it into practice. As a matter of fact, the policy proved successful, in spite of the eventual loss to England, a century later, of a portion of her colonies; while in a different and higher form, that of an imperial federated Zollverein, it is still regarded by many as the solution of the possibly insoluble problem of imperial government.

In a speech at the Savoy, in London, in 1917, the Premier of Newfoundland, England’s oldest colony, gave notable expression to such a return to the policy of an earlier day. "This Empire," he said, "cannot live as a political empire unless it is developed as an economic empire. All the raw material produced in the Empire should be manufactured in the Empire before it leaves the Empire, and nothing should be admitted into the Empire that could be produced in the Empire."[1] Let us not condemn too hastily the economic theories of the seventeenth century until we are quite sure whither those of the twentieth are to lead us.

The strength of an ocean empire lies wholly in sea-power, and the roots of sea-power in the merchant marine. By her application of the Mercantile Theory, England forced the Dutch, who had "run hackney all the world over," from the carrying-trade of her colonies; and for all the centuries since, she has been the great commercial nation of the world. France, who abandoned Colbert’s policy, and turned her back on the sea in 1672, embarking upon a career of Continental conquest, was, during the next century, to be beaten by England single-handed for the first time since the Middle Ages, to have her merchant shipping swept away, and to lose Martinique, Guadaloupe, Canada, and India to her rival.[2]

It has too frequently been assumed to be an obvious conclusion that the Navigation Acts of the seventeenth century were a colossal blunder, because, in part, the commercial policy

[1. Sir Edward Morris, Speech at the Savoy, March 14, 1917. Given in London Times, March 15, p. 6, col. 3.]

[2. Cf. A. T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History (Boston, 1898), pp. 88, 540, 73, 75 f.]

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of England lost her the continental colonies in the eighteenth. Those who would commit themselves to such a view might well determine whether, had England not made use of the weapons of the earlier century, and thus developed that naval power which alone enabled her to protect her American possessions, she would have had any colonies left, continental or other, to be kept or lost by any policies which she might adopt in the later period.

Having glanced at the theory of empire as it was understood by those at home, we must turn to consider the measures adopted to reduce it to practice, and also the views of imperial relations held by the colonists.

We may again emphasize the fact that the colonies were dependencies of England, and not independent nations. It was as much the right and duty of England to assert and maintain some sort of imperial control over them as it has been of the United States to do the same over her own territorial possessions. The colonists were Englishmen, settled upon English lands, subject to English laws, entitled to the rights of Englishmen at home, protected by English power. The control exercised over them was not that of a foreign nation, or imposed by conquest; and the mere fact that some control should be exercised could not in itself be construed as an act of oppression or tyranny. Had the waste lands on which these emigrating Englishmen settled been contiguous to the borders of any English county, none of the questions that arose as to their relations to English sovereignty would have arisen. They were all due to the distance, translated into time, that separated these English subjects from the seat of authority, and to the new conditions of their strange environment. From those two elements, "arose all that was peculiar and exceptional in their relations with the British government."[1]

[1. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. III, pp. 4 f.; "The English colonies, however, were not sister communities of England, but dependent local jurisdictions for whose welfare and safety the mother-country had assumed the responsibility." Beer, Origins, p. 301. For discussion of the element of distance, cf. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain, pp. 32 ff.]

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At the time when the New England colonies were planted, the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty, of the supreme authority in the state of that body which had hitherto been regarded rather as a judicial than a legislative one, was beginning to take hold of men’s minds. It required, however, the ordeal by battle of a civil war to decide the question; and it was not until the Restoration that Parliament took its permanent place among English institutions.[1] The close connection of the colonies with the Crown arose from the fact that, during the period of their founding, their relations to the government of England were mainly with the Executive and as occupiers of the soil, the executive power being then lodged in the King in Council, and the title to the land being vested in the Crown.[2] As the constitutional situation gradually altered, the colonies remained, of course, subject to the sovereign power, wherever located, as did Englishmen at home, although so complex, and difficult of both legal and equitable settlement, were the questions of sovereignty in the Empire raised by the phenomena of overseas dominions, that it is highly questionable whether their solution has ever been found. Only a few years ago, a brilliant Englishman could speak of the bonds then uniting England and her colonies as "a confusion of legal formulas and brittle sympathies"; and although, as tested in the world-crisis of the Great War, those sympathies have proved anything but brittle, his conclusion that imperial sovereignty is, in reality, non-existent, seems irrefutable.[3] The ship of state to-day, compared to that of the seventeenth century, is as a dreadnought to the Mayflower; but if, after three centuries, the problem of imperial organization is yet awaiting solution, with the best of will on the part of both England and the dominions, there need be little surprise, and certainly no bitterness, over the slow and blundering beginnings. Unfortunately, owing to the uncertainty,

[1. C. H. McIlwain, The High Court of Parliament and its Supremacy (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1910), pp. 109, 158, 352 ff., 137, 145.]

[2. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. III, p. 15; C. M. Andrews, British Committees, p. 10.]

[3. F. S. Oliver, Alexander Hamilton (London, n.d.), pp. 450, 447.]

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in the course of England’s political evolution, as to where sovereignty really lay, and also to the inherent difficulties involved in the question of the realm and the dominions, alluded to in an earlier chapter, the way was all too open for controversial misunderstandings on purely technical grounds between the colonies and the mother-country. And this quite apart from the difficulties raised by distance, and the attempted course of Stuart usurpation, against which latter, it must be remembered, the forces of freedom were to struggle in old England as well as in her colonies.

During the period covered by this volume, control over the colonies was asserted in various ways and at various times by both Parliament and the Crown. Patentees of the royal charters not infrequently asked Parliament to confirm their privileges; while that body often inquired into the use which was being made of those monopolistic documents; for it is sometimes forgotten that such a charter as that obtained by Massachusetts, for example, while regarded by the company as the basis of its liberties, could also, quite as legitimately, be regarded by the nation as creating a monopoly in one of its worst forms--that of the exclusive use of the Crown, or public, lands. For the most part, however, Parliament confined itself to passing legislation regarding trade only, its control over the customs being continuous from 1641.[1]

Those who intended to found plantations necessarily had to apply to the king for a charter, in order to obtain possession of the soil and exemption from certain laws covering emigration and export. Technically, the charters of the corporate colonies ranked merely with those of English municipal corporations. According to a strict interpretation of the law, therefore, so long as the private rights of individuals were not infringed, the English government would be technically justified in altering colonial institutions, or in dividing and combining colonies, without the consent of the inhabitants.[2] As

[1. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. III, p. 14; Beer, Origins, p. 341; Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum (London, 1911), vol. 11, p. 425.]

[2. Osgood, American Colonies, vol. III, pp. 7 ff. The provinces were the equivalents of English counties.]

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is always the case, old laws and institutions were slightly altered by the use of legal fictions and by modifications in practice, to meet the needs of a new situation. It is unthinkable that an entirely new body of law, and a wholly new set of institutions, should have been created, to serve political contingencies that could by no means have been foreseen.

The element of distance again came into play, to alter profoundly the practical effect of legal technicalities. In England the sovereign power, in exercising its jurisdiction over municipalities, had local knowledge of conditions, and could take immediate and effective action. Moreover, even when the citizens of the municipality were not represented in Parliament, they were yet largely protected from acts of oppression by the fact that such acts were prevented by the self-defensive foresight of other municipalities, which were represented. The situation in regard to the colonies was entirely different. Owing to the distance which separated them from home, it was impossible that either the king or Parliament could have accurate knowledge of local conditions, or take prompt measures. The difficulties as to both these points, in the unsettled state of England in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, were responsible for the extraordinary freedom which the colonists enjoyed from interference in their domestic political affairs. In addition, as their local conditions were little understood, and of but slight moment to the bulk of Englishmen at home, and as the interests of one colony frequently conflicted with those of another differently situated, their rights, in the absence of parliamentary representation, did not possess even that vicarious protection enjoyed by their legal equivalents, the unrepresented municipal corporations in England. Of necessity, therefore, colonial interests, from the standpoint of the colonists, were bound to be in part neglected by England, and in part misunderstood, while they served, to a far greater extent than was possible with those of any class or body at home, as the hunting-ground of rival cliques of self-interested individuals or groups.

Down to 1643, when Parliament, as a result of the Civil

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War, assumed the position of executive head of the government, colonial affairs had been in the hands of the King in Council, and had been managed by a succession of committees, sub-committees and commissions, one of which we have already encountered on the other side of the water at the time of the troubles over the Massachusetts charter.[1] During the period of the Interregnum, these were replaced by a tangle of committees of Parliament and the Protector’s Council, none of which were continuous, or able to formulate and carry through a consistent policy. We have already seen the results of the administrative confusion, in the opportunity which it gave the New England colonies, and of which they made full use, to develop their local institutions and policy in almost entire disregard of their position in the Empire.

This almost complete absence of any steady policy or consistent control over the component parts of the imperial structure not only was unacceptable to the merchants at home, but would probably have been destructive of the Empire had it continued without change. Certain measures of far-reaching importance, however, had already been enacted under Cromwell; and the Restoration, which strengthened the government and united the people, enabled England to undertake a more comprehensive scheme for imperial organization, although in New England, owing to the incorrigible tendencies of the Stuarts, it blundered into criminal folly.

At first, two councils were created, one for Trade, and the other for Plantations, their instructions largely following drafts prepared by the London merchants Povey and Noell, who had for some years been actively engaged in the study of colonial questions, and the formulation of a colonial policy.[2] However these instructions might strike colonists who refused to acknowledge any right of control whatever by the mother- country, they could not but appear wise and just to the statesmen and citizens at home. The councillors were ordered, in

[1. Cf. Andrews, British Committees, pp. 12 ff.; P. L. Kaye, The Colonial Executive prior to the Restoration (J. H. U. S.), pp. 55 ff.]

[2. Andrews, British Committees, pp. 38, 56, 67 ff.]

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the first place, to make a complete survey--by means of correspondence with the colonial governors--of the laws and institutions, population and means of defense of each colony. They were to study "means for the rendering those dominions usefull to England, and England helpful to them, and for the bringing the several Colonies and Plantations, within themselves, into a more certain civill and uniforme waie of government and for the better ordering and distributing of publique justice among them." They were, further, to maintain a correspondence with the local authorities in the several colonies, so that they might have constant knowledge of "their complaints, their wants, their abundance," and their shipping, the latter for revision of the Navigation Laws. Finally, they were to study the methods employed by other states in their colonial government, and to call experts to their assistance in any particular when needed.[1] The Council was made up of able men, almost all of them authorities on colonial questions, and in close touch with the colonies, while the business, in the first instance, was frequently entrusted to experts.[2] Of the work of the Council, Professor Andrews writes, that "there was not an important phase of colonial life and government, not a colonial claim or dispute, that was not considered carefully, thoroughly, and in the main, impartially."[3] In fact, an unbiased study of the actions taken by the Privy Council and its committees during nearly the whole of the seventeenth century leads one to agree with the editor of the Acts, that, as a governing body, it was "anxious to help, willing to take advice, free from preconception."[4]

The only individual connecting link between New England and the government in England was the unofficial "agent" whom one or another of the colonies appointed at times of

[1. Andrews, British Committees, where the texts of the Instructions and of Povey’s Overtures are both given.]

[2. The membership included Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, who had served on Plantation Committees during the Interregnum; Robert Boyle, President of the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England; Sir Peter Leese and Sir James Draxe, old Barbadian planters; Povey, Noell, Digges, and Colleton, all merchants and experts on colonial trade. Ibid., pp. 76 f.]

[3. Ibid., p. 76.]

[4. Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680, p. xi.]

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crisis, such as the Hocking murder or the Dr. Child petition, to present their case to the authorities. Although unofficial, the office was recognized by the English government, and such agents were employed by most of the colonies, island as well as continental, the office becoming an integral part of the administrative machinery of the following century.[1]

Such, in bare outline, were the organs employed by England in the administration of the colonies. Of the legislative enactments designed to build up the Empire, the most important were precursors of the more famous Navigation Acts of the following century. In 1650, 1651, 1660, and 1663, ordinances were passed for the control of trade and shipping, which, in the period now under review, were more important in their political than in their economic influence upon New England. Holland had been the first of the European nations to understand the effect upon economic prosperity at home of the building up of colonial trade, and in the middle of the seventeenth century threatened to absorb the entire carrying trade of the world, the value of goods shipped annually in Dutch bottoms having been estimated at a billion francs.[2] The English Navigation Acts of Cromwell and Charles II, like the policy initiated by Colbert in France, were aimed mainly at breaking the monopoly of Holland, and building up the national merchant-marines of England and France. Even the fisheries off the coasts of England and Scotland had passed into Dutch hands, and Englishmen had long been clamoring for some means of fighting commercially the growing menace of Dutch sea power.[3]

As the effects upon New England, until the following century, were mainly indirect, it is not necessary to give the details of the various acts in the order in which they were passed. Their aim was twofold--destructive and constructive.

[1. Cf. L. P. Kellogg, "The American Colonial Charter," Annual Report, American Historical Association, 1903, vol. I, p. 228; E. P. Tanner, "Colonial Agencies in England during the 18th Century," Political Science Quarterly vol. XVI, pp. 24 ff.]

[2. Mahan, Sea Power, p. 96. Cf. Leroy-Beaulieu, De la Colonisation chez les peuples modernes, vol. I, pp. 113 ff.]

[3. G. Edmondson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry (Oxford, 1912), pp. 36 ff., 79, 154.]

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In the former aspect, they aimed at diminishing, if not wholly destroying, the shipping, and so both the commerce and the naval power of competing states. On their constructive side, their design was to build up the shipping of the English Empire, and, in reference to certain articles, to make England the sole market for their trade. As to the first point, the colonies were put upon the same basis as England herself; and, in exchange for the advantages derived by her from the second, she offered the colonists certain privileges in the home markets. It was, therefore, enacted that no trade could be carried on between England and her dominions except in ships owned by her or them, and manned by English or colonial crews, the same restriction applying to all goods imported into either from any foreign country or colony in America, Asia, and Africa.[1] This was merely an extension of acts already frequently passed, or provisions in the early charters, such as we have already noted.

The other main point, that of limiting the markets in certain goods to England, was also merely an extension of another long-familiar idea. When the economic organization, in the later Middle Ages, was still largely municipal, it had been found advantageous to designate certain towns as the sole markets, or "staple," for certain goods. For some centuries, the belief in the economic soundness of this practice continued to be held; and, as we noted in the very first charter relating to America,--that of Cabot, in 1496,--it was required that all goods should pass through the port of Bristol. The Navigation Act of Charles II required that certain "enumerated" commodities produced in the colonies should be sold only in England, and not directly to foreigners, thus making England the "staple" for the Empire in the same way in which certain municipalities had formerly been the staples for the kingdom. Theoretically, the colonists were in the same relative position to England in the matter as were Englishmen at home to the staple municipalities, although, of course, the practical disadvantages and injustice to the colonists were much greater when the scheme was made imperial.

[1. Macdonald, Select Charters, pp. 106 ff., 110 ff., 133 ff.]

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The list of enumerated commodities in the seventeenth century, however, was very limited, and no such restrictions were placed upon purely intercolonial commerce. A number of the most important colonial exports, such as wheat and fish, were not included; while of the more important ones named, none were produced in New England, and but one--tobacco--by any of the American continental colonies. As an offset to the advantages accruing to England by thus controlling the sale of the enumerated commodities, that country placed prohibitive duties on many of them when imported from other countries, thus giving the colonies the monopoly of the market to which they were limited. In the case of tobacco, which was successfully grown in England, she incurred the resentment of a considerable element in her own agricultural classes by forbidding its culture. So great, indeed, was the opposition to giving the American planters the monopoly of the English market, that the government had for many years to use armed forces against its own citizens to keep faith with the colonies.[1]

The only other point of importance in these early acts was the provision in that of 1663, that no European manufactured goods could be shipped to the colonies unless first landed in England, Wales, or Berwick. Owing, however, to a system of drawbacks on the duties paid in these cases, such goods frequently sold in the colonies at lower prices than they could be sold for in England itself; and certain exceptions, such as Portuguese wines, and salt for the fisheries, were of especial benefit to New England. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the New England colonies, although the least desirable part of the Empire from the English standpoint, and constantly giving trouble politically, were nevertheless accorded particularly considerate treatment from time to time, within the limits of the imperial system. Under the Commonwealth, in 1644, they had been exempted from the payment of all English

[1. Tobacco was raised in eighteen English counties, to be trampled down annually by royal troops of horse, so strongly had both the plant and the colonial theory, respectively, taken root in English soil and English minds. Cf. Beer, Origins, pp. 117 ff. Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613- 1680, pp. xxii ff.]

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import and export duties, which naturally gave them a great advantage over the other colonies, and made them the envy of the Empire.[1] A dozen years later, by an act of Parliament, foreign ships were allowed to carry fish from both the Newfoundland and New England fisheries, nullifying to that extent the Act of 1650; and, after the Restoration, their trade was specifically exempted from certain onerous clauses in the Navigation Acts, as then interpreted, although that of the other colonies was not.[2]

As to the success of the above acts, there can now be little question, and their former condemnation on economic grounds has given place to the recognition of the fact that they did indeed secure the objects intended, and that the welfare of the Empire as a whole, as well as that of England herself, was promoted by them. The merchant marine was doubled in eighteen years, the Dutch and other competitors beaten off, and the Empire, and notably New England, greatly increased in power and wealth.

As we have already indicated, however, European imperial theory in the seventeenth century had one serious defect. It failed to take account of human nature in the colonist. Like so many modern theories which consider the state as all, and the individual as nothing, it made the blunder of treating the abstraction as human, and the human as an abstraction. It asked too much of the individual, and, entirely apart from selfish motives, which were found in the colonies quite as much as in the mother- country, it almost of necessity subordinated the interests of the former to those of the latter. The success of the Empire as a whole was doubtless far more dependent upon the strength and prosperity of England than upon the fortunes of any individual colony; but that was a point of view more likely to be appreciated by the contemporary citizens at home, and the historians of a later day, than by the contemporary colonist, who saw his particular interests made to suffer for those of the Empire, and his local pride constantly wounded by a sense of subordination to a power

[1. Interregnum, Acts and Ordinances, vol. I, p. 571.]

[2. Beer, Origins, pp. 397, 114.]

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three thousand miles away. For in all the difficulties between England and her colonies, we continually have to come back to the element of distance. What made the acts of the government seem autocratic was not the fact that the colonists were not directly represented in Parliament,--for neither were a large number of Englishmen at home,--but that, by virtue of the effects of distance, the central government was external to the colonists, in a sense in which it never was to the unrepresented Englishmen in England itself. It is difficult to see how any system of representation could have been devised which would have improved the position of the colonies, although representation in the English Parliament was proposed by Barbadoes as early as 1652.[1] There was, in fact, no original thought contributed by any of the colonies, which was of practical use in devising any better scheme of imperial control than that which England was gradually evolving. During the formative period, the colonies offered nothing of a constructive character to the solution of the problem, and contented themselves with a purely obstructionist attitude of attempting to ignore or oppose any measure which they deemed in conflict with their local interests.

At more than one period, English colonists have been accused of believing that "it is the undoubted right of every Englishman to settle where he likes, to behave as he sees fit, and to call upon the Mother-Country to foot the bill."[2] This, however, is not merely a colonial characteristic: it is the spirit developed upon every frontier, as the later history of American westward expansion may be called upon to illustrate; and, as we have pointed out, the whole chain of colonies formed the long encircling frontier of England. The spirit of stubborn resistance to any interference with their legal rights, or even with their mere freedom of action, was quite as often found in the island-colonies of both France and England as it was in the continental ones now included in the United

[1. Cal. State Pap., Col., 1574-1660, p. 373. Cf. The Groans of the Plantations (London, 1689), pp. 15 f., 23 f.]

[2. Acts Privy Council, Colonial, 1613-1680, p. xxix.]

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States. The residents of Barbadoes, for example, in a memorial condemning the Navigation Act of 1651, used language which has a ring that has often been considered peculiarly American. After denying that Parliament had any jurisdiction over them, because they were unrepresented, the settlers went on to say that, if they could not obtain a peaceful settlement of the dispute, yet "wee will not alienate ourselves from those old heroick virtues of true Englishmen to prostitute our freedom and privileges to which we are borne to the will and opinion of any one; neither do wee think our number so contemptible, nor our resolution so weake as to be forced or perswaded to so ignoble a submission, and we cannot think that there are any amongst us who are see simple and soe unworthily minded, that they would not rather chose a noble death than forsake their ould liberties and privileges."[1]

In spite of the nobility of the sentiment, however, the position assumed, as was frequently the case in Massachusetts, was in fact unwarranted from a strictly legal point of view. Had the stand taken by England on important points in the long colonial controversy been indeed illegal, the problem would have been enormously simplified. As a matter of fact, it was rather the contentions of the colonists which were, from the strict technical standpoint, the illegal ones.[2] But the real questions were not questions of law, although, with the instincts of their race, the Englishmen on both sides of the water fought them out as if they were. One might as well have passed laws to forbid a boy outgrowing his clothes, as to forbid rapidly developing and far-separated colonies from outgrowing the doctrine of a centralized imperial sovereignty. This fact, which is now wholly admitted by the most patriotic Englishmen, both at home and in the dominions, was unfortunately beyond the ken of seventeenth-century thought.

The attitude of the most powerful colony in New England had been foreshadowed from the very beginning. The transfer

[1. R. H. Schomburgk, History of Barbadoes (London, 1848), pp. 706 ff. Cf., for a similar spirit in Bermuda, Beer, Old Colonial System, vol. II, p. 99.]

[2. Cf. McIlwain, High Court of Parliament, pp. 364 ff.]

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of the Massachusetts charter to the colony itself had obviously been for the purpose of escaping as far as possible from the jurisdiction of the English courts, and establishing a virtually independent government, under a strained construction of that document. We have already seen how the colony had arrogated to itself sovereign powers, how it had over and over refused appeals to the home courts and Crown, how it had erected fortifications, and taken other military measures to resist by force the assertion of her authority by England, and how it had made treaties of both war and peace with foreign powers. In 1652, it established a mint, the coins having the famous device of the pine tree and the word "Massachusetts" on one side, and "New England" and the date on the other, but with no recognition of the king.[1] Even the mere oath of allegiance was refused whenever possible, although required by the charter itself.[2] All of these acts represented a consistent policy, openly avowed among themselves by the leaders, of disputing any claims of the home country to any authority whatsoever over the colony.

From time to time, crises in its affairs brought out official declarations of its attitude. Owing to the exigencies of the Civil War in England, Parliament had issued commissions to certain officers of the merchant marine, authorizing them to make prizes of any vessels which they might find in the royal service. In the summer of 1644, one of these officers, a Captain Stagg, appeared in an armed ship in Boston harbor, and there made prize of a Bristol ship, according to his orders. A tumult was raised, and many of the magistrates and clergy, asserting that "the people’s liberties" had been violated, were in favor of forcing the release of the seized vessel. A majority, however, decided that the Parliament’s commission must be recognized; for, if its authority were denied in this, then the

[1. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. i, pp. 84, 104. The right to coin money was occasionally granted in the early charters, but not in that of Massachusetts.]

[2. Cf. the form of oath in Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 201. In 1665, under pressure from the Royal Commission, the General Court agreed that it "would order the taking of the oath of allegeance, according as the charter comands." Ibid., p. 206.]

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foundation of the colony’s patent also would be denied, and if they relied solely upon their Indian purchases to give them title to the country, they would have to renounce "England’s protection, which were a great weakness in us, seing their care hath been to strengthen our liberties and not overthrow them"; and, also, if they should by opposing the Parliament "cause them to forsake us, we could have no protection or countenance from any, but should lie open as a prey to all men." The way for resistance at any time, however, was left open by declaring that, by the course of affairs in England, the Parliament had taught that "salus populi is suprema lex," and that, in case that body should ever prove of a "malignant spirit," "we may make use of salus populi to withstand any authority from thence to our hurt." During the discussion, some had maintained that by their patent the colony was subject "to no other power but among ourselves"; but that was denied.[1]

Two years later, however, in connection with the Dr. Child petition, and the order of the English Commissioners concerning Samuel Gorton, the local aspects of which have been discussed in a previous chapter, the General Court undertook to define the colony’s relations to England more definitely. While there was some difference of opinion, the majority of the magistrates and of the clergy consulted took the stand that by the charter they had "absolute power of government," with authority to "make laws, to erect all sorts of magistracy, to correct, punish, pardon, govern, and rule the people absolutely," without the interposition of any superior power. They denied that any appeal lay against any of their proceedings, or that they were bound, "further than in a way of justification," to make answer to any complaints against them in England. They drew a distinction between corpora