about land titles adjusted, an amicable treaty with Maryland matured, and peace with the Indians confirmed. Taxes were assessed, not in proportion to numbers, but to men's abilities and estates. The spirit of liberty, which moved in the English parliament, belonged equally to the colony; and the rights of property, the freedom of industry, the exercise of civil franchises, seemed to be secured to themselves and their posterity. "A future immunity from taxes and impositions," except such as should be freely voted for their own wants, "was expected as the fruits of the endeavors of their legislature." The restraints with which their navigation was threatened were not enforced, and Virginia enjoyed nearly all the liberties which a monarch could concede, and retain his supremacy.

The triumph of the popular party in England did not alter the condition or the affections of the Virginians. The commissioners appointed by parliament in November, 1643, with full authority over the plantations, among whom were Haselrig, Henry Vane, Pym, and Cromwell, promised, indeed, freedom from English taxation; but this immunity was already enjoyed. They gave the colony liberty to choose its own governor; but it had no dislike to Berkeley; and, though there was a party for the parliament, yet the king's authority, which Charles had ever mildly exercised, was maintained.

The condition of contending factions in England had brought the opportunity of legislation independent of European control; and the act of the assembly, restraining religious liberty, proves the attachment of the representatives of Virginia to the Episcopal church and to royalty. "Here," the tolerant Whitaker had written, "neither surplice nor subscription is spoken of;" and many Puritan families, perhaps some even of the Puritan clergy, had planted themselves within the jurisdiction of Virginia. The honor of Laud had been vindicated by a judicial sentence, and south of the Potomac the decrees of the court of high commission were allowed to be valid; but there is no trace of persecutions in the earliest history of the colony. The laws were harsh: the administration seems to have been mild. A disposition to non-conformity was soon to show itself even in the council. An invitation,

which had been sent to Boston for Puritan ministers, implies a belief that they would have been admitted. But the democratic revolution in England had given an immediate political importance to religious sects: to tolerate Puritanism was to nurse a republican party. It was, therefore, in March, 1643, specially ordered that no minister should preach or teach, publicly or privately, except in conformity to the constitutions of the church of England, and non-conformists were banished. It was in vain that the ministers, invited from Boston by the Puritan settlements in Virginia, carried letters from Winthrop, written to Berkeley and his council by order of the general court of Massachusetts. "The hearts of the people were much inflamed with desire after the ordinances;" but the missionaries were silenced by the government, and ordered to leave the country. Sir William Berkeley was "a courtier, and very malignant toward the way of the churches" in New England.

With the Indians no terms of peace were entertained. Hearing of the dissensions in England, they resolved on one more attempt at a general massacre. On the eighteenth of April, 1644, they began a concerted onset upon the frontier settlements. But hardly had they steeped their hands in blood before they were dismayed by the sense of their own weakness, and, after having killed three hundred persons, they fled to distant woods.

Effective measures were promptly taken by the English, and so little was apprehended, when they were on their guard, that, two months after the massacre, Berkeley embarked for England, leaving Richard Kemp as his substitute. A border warfare continued, yet ten men were sufficient to protect a place of danger.

In 1646, the aged Opechancanough was taken captive, and died of wounds. In October, of that year, Necotowance,.his successor, about fifteen months after Berkeley's return from England, made peace with Virginia, on the conditions of submission and a cession of lands. The original possessors of the soil began to vanish from the neighborhood of English settlements, leaving no enduring memorials but the names of rivers and mountains.

The colonists acquired the management of all their concerns; war was levied, and peace concluded, and territory annexed, in conformity to the acts of their own representatives. Possessed of security and quiet, abundance of land, a free market for their staple, and having England for their guardian against foreign oppression, rather than their ruler, the colonists enjoyed all the prosperity which a virgin soil, equal laws, and general uniformity of condition and industry could bestow. Their cottages were filled with children, the ports with ships and emigrants. At Christmas, 1648, there were trading in Virginia ten ships from London, two from Bristol, twelve Hollanders, and seven from New England. The number of the colonists was already twenty thousand, and they who had sustained no griefs were not tempted to engage in the feuds which rent the mother country. After the execution of Charles, in 1649, though there were not wanting some who favored republicanism, the government recognised his son without dispute. The disasters of the royalists in England strengthened their party in the New World. Men of consideration "among the nobility, gentry, and clergy," struck "with horror and despair" at the beheading of Charles I., and desiring no reconciliation with unrelenting "rebels," made their way to the shores of the Chesapeake, where every house was for them a "hostelry," and every planter a friend. "Virginia was whole for monarchy, and the last country, belonging to England, that submitted to obedience of the commonwealth."

In June, 1650, the royal exile, from his retreat at Breda, transmitted to Berkeley a new commission, and still controlled the distribution of offices. But the parliament did not long permit its authority to be denied. By a memorable ordinance of October third, it empowered the council of state to reduce the rebellious colonies to obedience, and, at the same time, prohibited foreign ships from trading at any of the ports "in Barbadoes, Antigua, Bermudas, and Virginia." Maryland, which had taken care to acknowledge the new order of things, was not expressly included in the ordinance.

While preparations were making for the reduction of the loyal colonies, the commercial policy of England underwent a

revision, to which the interests of English merchants and shipbuilders imparted consistency and durability.

No sooner had Spain and Portugal found their way round the Cape of Good Hope and to America than they claimed a monopoly of the traffic of the wider world, and the Roman religion, dividing it between them, forbade the intrusion of competitors by the pains of excommunication.

In Europe, the freedom of the seas was vindicated against Spain and Portugal by a state hardly yet recognised as independent, and driven by the stern necessity of its dense population to seek resources upon the water. Grotius, its gifted son, who first gave expression to the idea that "free ships make free goods," defended the liberty of commerce, and appealed to the judgment of all free governments and nations against the maritime restrictions, which humanity denounced as contrary to the principles of social intercourse, which justice derided as infringing the clearest natural rights, which enterprise rejected as a monstrous usurpation of the oceans and the winds. The relinquishment of navigation in the East Indies was required by Spain as the price at which its independence should be acknowledged, and the rebel republic preferred to defend its separate existence by arms rather than purchase security by circumscribing the courses of its ships. While the inglorious James of England was negotiating about points of theology, while the more unhappy Charles was struggling against the liberties of his subjects, the Dutch, a little confederacy, which had been struck from the side of Spain, a new people, scarcely known as a nation, had, by their superior skill, begun to engross the carrying trade of the world. Their ships were found in the harbors of Virginia, in the West Indian archipelago, in the south of Africa, among the tropical islands of the Indian Ocean, and even in the harbors of China and Japan. Their tradinghouses were planted on the Hudson and the coast of Guinea, in Java and Brazil. One or two rocky islets in the West Indies, in part neglected by the Spaniards as unworthy of culture, furnished these daring merchants a convenient shelter for a large contraband traffic with the terra firma. The freedom and the enterprise of Holland acquired maritime power, and skill and wealth, such as the monopoly of Spain could never command.

The causes of the commercial greatness of Holland were forgotten in envy at its success. It ceased to appear as the gallant champion of the freedom of the seas against Spain, and became envied as the successful rival. The English government resolved to protect the English merchant. Cromwell desired to confirm the maritime power of his country; and Saint-John, a Puritan and a republican in theory, though never averse to a limited monarchy, devised the first act of navigation, which, in 1651, the politic Whitelocke introduced and carried through parliament. Henceforward, the commerce between England and her colonies, between England and the rest of the world, was to be conducted in ships solely owned, and principally manned, by Englishmen. Foreigners might bring to England nothing but the products of their respective countries, or those of which their countries were the established staples. The act was levelled against Dutch commerce, and was but a protection of British shipping; it contained no clause relating to a colonial monopoly, or specially injurious to an American colony. Of itself it inflicted no wound on Virginia or New England. In vain did the Dutch expostulate against the act as a breach of commercial amity; the parliament studied the interests of England, and would not repeal laws to please a neighbor.

A naval war followed, which Cromwell desired, and Holland endeavored to avoid. Each people kindled with national enthusiasm; and the annals of recorded time had never known so many great naval actions in such quick succession. This was the war in which Blake and Ayscue and De Ruyter gained their glory; and Tromp fixed a broom to his mast, as if to sweep the English flag from the seas.

Cromwell aspired to make England the commercial emporium of the world. His plans extended to the acquisition of harbors in the Spanish Netherlands; France was obliged to pledge her aid to conquer, and her consent to yield, Dunkirk, Mardyke, and Gravelines; and Dunkirk, in the summer of 1658, was given up to his ambassador by the French king in person. He desired harbors in the North Sea and the Baltic, and an alliance with Protestant Sweden was to secure him Bremen and Elsinore and Dantzic. In the West Indies, he