been two thousand five hundred. In one hundred and seventy years that number increased forty-fold; and the government, which was hardly thought to contain checks enough on the power of the people to endure even among shepherds and farmers, protected a dense population and the accumulations of a widely extended commerce. Nowhere in the world were life, liberty, and property safer than in Rhode Island.

The thanks of the colony were unanimously voted to a triumvirate of benefactors: to "King Charles of England, for his high and inestimable, yea, incomparable favor;" to Clarendon, who had shown "to the colony exceeding great care and love;" and to the modest and virtuous Clarke, the persevering and disinterested envoy, who, during a twelve years' mission, had sustained himself by his own exertions and a mortgage on his estate; whose whole life was a continued exercise of benevolence, and who, at his death, bequeathed all his possessions for the relief of the needy and the education of the young. Others have sought office to advance their fortunes; he, like Roger Williams, parted with his little means for the public good. He had unsparing enemies in Massachusetts, and left a name on which no one cast a shade.

In May, 1664, the assembly of the people of Rhode Island, at their regular session, established religious freedom in the very words of the charter: "No person shall at any time hereafter be any ways called in question for any dif erence of opinion in matters of religion." In May, 1665, the legislature asserted that "liberty to all persons, as to the worship of God, had been a principle maintained in the colony from the very beginning thereof; and it was much in their hearts to preserve the same liberty for ever." The commissioners from England, who visited Rhode Island, reported of its people: "They allow liberty of conscience to all who live civilly; they admit of all religions." And again, in 1680, the government of the colony could say, what there was no one oppressed individual to controvert: "We leave every man to walk as God persuades his heart; all our people enjoy freedom of conscience." To Jews who had inquired if they could find a home in Rhode Island, the assembly of 1684 made answer: "We declare that they may expect as good pro

tection here as any stranger, not being of our nation, residing among us ought to have ;" and in August, 1694, the Jews, who from the time of their expulsion from Spain had had no safe resting-place, entered the harbor of Newport to find equal protection, and in a few years to build a house of God for a Jewish congregation. Freedom of conscience "to every man, whether Jew, or Turk, or papist, or whomsoever that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares," was, from the first, the trophy of Rhode Island.

In 1665, it divided its general assembly into two housesa change which, near the close of the century, was permanently adopted. It was importuned by Plymouth and vexed by Connecticut on the subject of boundaries.

The royal commissioners, in 1665, required of all the oath of allegiance; the general assembly, scrupulous in its respect for the rights of conscience, would listen to no proposition except for an engagement of fidelity and due obedience to the laws as a condition of exercising the elective franchise. This engagement being found irksome to the Quakers, it was the next year repealed.

Virginia possessed far stronger claims to favor than Rhode Island and Connecticut; and, in April, 1661, Sir William Berkeley embarked for England as her agent. We shall see how vainly she asked relief from the navigation act, or a guarantee for her constitution. Her agent, joining with seven others, obtained, in 1663, the grant of Carolina, which narrowed her limits on her whole southern frontier. King Charles was caricatured in Holland with a woman on each arm and courtiers picking his pocket; this time they took provinces, which, if divided among the eight, would have given to each a tract as extensive as the kingdom of France. To gratify favorites, Virginia, in 1669, was dismembered by lavish grants; and, in 1673, all that remained of it was given away for a generation, as recklessly as a man might part with a life-estate in a barren field.

To complete the picture of the territorial changes made by Charles II., it must be added that, in 1664, he not only enfeoffed his brother, the duke of York, with the country between Pemaquid and the St. Croix, but-in defiance of his own

charter to Winthrop and the possession of the Dutch and the rights of ten thousand inhabitants-with the country from Connecticut river to Delaware bay. In 1667, Acadia, with indefinite boundaries, was restored to the French. In 1669, the frozen zone was invaded, and Prince Rupert and his associates were endowed with a monopoly of the regions on Hudson's bay. In 1677, the proprietary rights to New Hampshire and Maine were revived, in the intent to purchase them. for the duke of Monmouth. In 1679, after Philip's war in New England, Mount Hope was hardly rescued from a courtier, then famous as the author of two indifferent comedies. The charter which secured a large and fertile province to William Penn, and thus invested philanthropy with executive power on the western bank of the Delaware, was a grant from Charles II. From the outer cape of Nova Scotia to Florida, with few exceptions, the tenure of every territory was changed. Further, the trade with Africa, the link in the chain of universal commerce, that first joined Europe, Asia, and America together, and united the Caucasian, the Malay, and the Ethiopian races, was given away to a company, which alone had the right of planting on the African coast.

During the first four years of his reign, Charles II. gave away a large part of a continent. Could he have continued as lavish, in the course of his rule he would have given away the world.

CHAPTER IV.

MASSACHUSETTS AND CHARLES II.

THE virtual independence which had been hitherto exercised by MASSACHUSETTS was too dear to be relinquished. The news of the restoration, brought to Boston in July, 1660, by the ships in which Goffe and Whalley, two of the regicide judges, were passengers, was received with skeptical anxiety, and no notice was taken of the event. At the session of the general court, in October, a motion for an address to the king did not succeed; affairs in England were still regarded as unsettled. In November, it became certain that the hereditary family of kings had recovered the throne, and that swarms of enemies to the colony had gathered round the new government; a general court was convened, and addresses were prepared for the parliament and the monarch. By advice of the great majority of elders, no judgment was expressed on the execution of Charles I. and "the grievous confusions" of the past. The colonists appealed to the king of England, as "a king who had seen adversity, and who, having himself been an exile, knew the hearts of exiles." They prayed for "the continuance of civil and religious liberties," and against complaints requested an opportunity of defence. "Let not the king hear men's words," such was their petition; "your servants are true men, fearing God and the king. We could not live without the public worship of God; that we might enjoy divine worship without human mixtures, we, not without tears, departed from our country, kindred, and fathers' houses. Our garments are become old by reason of the very long journey; ourselves, who came away in our strength, are, many of us, become gray-headed, and some of

us stooping for age." In return for the protection of their liberties, they promise the blessing of a people whose trust is in God.

Leverett, the patriotic and able agent of the colony, was instructed to intercede with members of parliament and the privy council for its chartered liberties; to resist appeals to England, alike in cases civil or criminal. Some hope was entertained that the new government might confirm to New England commerce the favors which the Long Parliament had conceded. But Massachusetts never gained an exemption from the severity of the navigation acts till she ceased to demand it as a favor.

At this juncture, Eliot, the apostle of the red men, the same who had claimed for the people a voice even in making treaties, published an essay" on the Christian commonwealth,' showing how it must be constituted through the willing selforganization of individuals into tens, then hundreds, then thousands, till at last the whole would form itself into one strictly popular government. His treatise was condemned as too full of the seditious doctrines of democratic liberty. Upon this the single-minded author did not hesitate to suppress it, and in guarded language to acknowledge the form of government by king, lords, and commons, as not only lawful, but eminent.

A letter from the king, expressing general good-will, could not quiet the apprehensions of the colonists. The committee for the plantations already, in April, 1661, surmised that Massachusetts would, if it dared, cast off its allegiance, and resort to an alliance with Spain, or to any desperate remedy, rather than admit of appeals to England. Upon this subject a controversy immediately arose; and the royal government resolved to establish the principle which the Long Parliament had waived.

It was therefore not without reason that the colony foreboded collision with the crown; and, after a full report from

numerous committee, of which Bradstreet, Hawthorne, Mather, and Norton were members, the general court, on the tenth of June, 1661, published a declaration of natural and chartered rights. In this paper, which was probably written