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CONCLUSION

We have now reviewed the political and administrative system of the British-American colonies as it was developed during the formative period of their existence. In some of the colonies three generations had passed away during the period, in others two, in still others only one. By 1690 the mass of the people who were living in the colonies were American born, or had been brought to the colonies in early life. Though in their large relations they were subordinate to Europe, yet their personal and local concerns were as distinct from those of contemporary Europeans as time or space could well make them. In their languages and in the type and traditions of their culture they were Europeans; but they were transplanted upon a new and distant continent, and felt chiefly the pressure of its environment. They had already become colonials in the full sense of the word, but had not yet reached a developed American type.

The population of the colonies had been drawn from the middle and lower classes, chiefly of England, but to an extent also of Scotland and Ireland and of various states of the continent of Europe. The extremes of the Old World, whether of wealth or poverty, rank or degradation, were not reproduced in America. Society, as the result of removal and new growth, at once assumed a greater equality. The class distinctions of Europe were softened, and people were thrown more into a general mass. Industrially the great majority of the colonists became tillers of the soil and artisans. A limited minority followed trade, usually in a small way, and some as a supplement to their agricultural pursuits. Indian trade offered special chances, akin to those of discovery and prospecting for land.

Of the professional classes, that of the clergy was most clearly differentiated and had relatively the largest number

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of representatives. In New England it was as prominent and influential as the same class had been in mediæval Europe. So far as the profession of teaching was followed, it was generally in close connection with the church and the clergy. Lawyers were few and were, as a rule, objects of suspicion. Though in many cases they found their way into public offices, they cannot be said to have constituted a class, and they had no clearly distinguishable political influence. In the provinces the higher offices were more often filled by men of military training than by those of distinct legal attainments. Physicians were no more clearly differentiated as a class than were teachers. Except among the clergy of New England, intellectual and literary pursuits were rarely followed in the colonies.

At the same time that colonial society assumed greater uniformity and equality than were characteristic of social relations in Europe, it became more isolated. The colonists were to a great extent shut off from Europe. Intercourse between one colony and another was also more difficult and less common than it was between adjacent counties in England. Their relations resembled those between England and the lowlands of Scotland or the civilized districts of Ireland, more than they did intercourse between adjacent parts of the realm. It is true that colonists of southern New England as a group knew and understood each other better than this comparison would imply. But they did not understand New Yorkers or settlers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Carolinas much better than Englishmen understood Scotchmen or Irishmen of the Pale. The same was true of the notions which inhabitants of the middle and southern provinces entertained respecting New England. Between these sections journeys were more easily made by water than by land. So laborious and difficult were they, whatever the element that was chosen, that they were undertaken by few except seamen, traders, and officials. There were no newsletters or newspapers, no system of couriers or postal service. The mass of colonists never travelled beyond their own localities or the bounds of their own provinces. The few schools and books which they had taught them little or nothing

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about their own environment, Only occasionally were intercolonial conferences held, and they were attended by only a few officials who came usually from a neighboring group of colonies. Except in New England, signs of a different order of things were only just beginning to appear as the period of the chartered colonies closes.

Not only was the knowledge possessed by individuals crude and rudimentary, but their sympathies were correspondingly narrow. The instruments of culture on a broad scale were lacking. The humanitarian spirit had not begun to awaken among the people. Their feelings of patriotism were as restricted as were their knowledge and sympathies. They found it difficult or impossible to sacrifice for objects which were distant, either in place or time. In many instances the affairs of their own colony were unknown to them, or awakened little interest. In such cases colony patriotism even was too broad for them to grasp. The interests of the moment, the interests of the town, the neighborhood, the family, the individual himself, absorbed the largest share of the colonist’s attention. This is a familiar fact in all communities, even at the present day; but it was intensified by the isolation, hard labor, and privations of frontier life. So fully occupied were the mass of the people who were thus situated with clearing the forest, building rude dwellings, laying out towns, fencing their farms, tilling the soil, caring for their flocks, trading with the Indians or protecting themselves against them, that they had time and strength left for little besides. Local and sectional religious interests furnished an added object of attention in New England.

Within the chartered colonies there was much to remind the people that they were parts of a common political system, and yet the fact was not brought constantly or effectively home to their consciousness. Colonies of that type were emphatically special jurisdictions, and they collectively existed under a highly developed system of self-government. We are accustomed to associate the idea of self-government with England and its institutions. In England the element of self-government appears in the counties and boroughs;

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in the degree of control which, under statutes and other guaranties of the central government, these localities, at any period, have enjoyed over their officials and over the raising and expenditure of revenue for local purposes. But in the colonies, especially in the seventeenth century, self-government proceeded very much farther than it did in the realm. In the colonies no acts of parliament regulated its development. Agents of the English executive were not to any extent present to direct or restrain the acts of the colonists. Colonial initiative extended without restraint, not merely to the administration of town and county government, to the collection and expenditure of local rates, and to the control of local officials, but to the affairs of entire provinces and germinal commonwealths. It was due to their remoteness and to the consequent absence of sovereign control, that the claim could with truth be made that the New England colonies ranked as political structures higher than municipalities and that provinces were more than English counties. The pressure of the privy council, of the central courts, of the officials of the central government, scarcely reached them, and in consequence they blossomed out into pseudo-statehood. We have seen that at the outset they were the products of private initiative. This, when followed through a remarkable course of development, culminated in the degree of independence which is thus indicated.

All writers who have discussed the early history of the British-American colonies have dwelt with greater or less emphasis on the degree of self-government which they enjoyed. In the preceding chapters an effort has been made to show in some detail in what that self-government consisted and under what forms it appeared. The degree to which it was actually enjoyed is indicated by the fact that it has been possible to describe thus fully the internal organization of the chartered colonies, and to follow the development of their policy, with only an occasional reference to king or parliament.

We have found that the special jurisdictions known as the chartered colonies had their own distinct executives and legislatures, their officials, courts, militia systems, their systems

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of revenue and expenditure, their territorial and Indian policies, their ecclesiastical systems, and their institutions of local government. In other words they possessed all the organs of statehood. Had they been legally independent of the home government, they would have needed institutionally little more than they already possessed.

These institutions, furthermore, were developed on American soil and were intended to meet needs which were distinctly local and characteristic of the frontier. Of the corporate colonies this is literally true. In the process of adapting the forms of the trading corporation to the purposes of colonial government, the colonists changed its content and created a new structure, distinct in purpose and character from anything which was previously known in English private or public law. In the Massachusetts charter certain faint outlines of the form which the colony was to assume can be seen, but of many of the features of the colony government it gives no indication; while of the policy which found expression through the forms one perceives no sign whatever in the royal grant. Four of the New England colonies owed their form and not a little of their policy to imitation of Massachusetts. The institutions of two of these, which had developed wholly on American soil, were afterward legalized, though not changed, by the grant of royal charters. The two other corporate colonies passed through the period of their separate existence without recognition by the English government. The settlements of New Hampshire and Maine also fell early under the government of Massachusetts. The latter remained permanently under its control; the former received an impress from Massachusetts which it was quite beyond the power of any proprietary or royal executive to efface.

Until after the Restoration the corporate colonies enjoyed to the full their system of de facto self-government. Instructions or commissions were not regularly received by them from England. By the leading colonies agents were sent to England only when such action could no longer be avoided. The acts of the colonial legislatures were not submitted to the crown, nor to the council of state, for its approval or

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disapproval. No appeals were allowed to go from the Puritan colonies to the privy council or council of state. The binding force of English statutes was either totally denied, or they were ignored when they operated as a restraining force upon the colonies. The administration of the oath of allegiance was neglected. Justice was not administered in the name of the king nor in that of the keepers of the liberties of England. The Puritan colonies sought precedents, and to an extent law, from the Hebrew commonwealth. In spirit and ideals New England was sui generis. So far did its colonies on the whole carry their tendencies toward independence that their position became to a degree anomalous, even in the early English colonial system.

As we have seen, the position of the proprietary provinces was somewhat different from this. None of the provinces originated without a charter from the crown, or a deed of bargain and sale from a proprietor. Their grantees and colonists were not squatters, as at the outset were the settlers of the four southern colonies of New England. Their charters indicated more clearly than did those of the corporate colonies the nature of the structure which was to result from the grants. Though the provinces were special jurisdictions and possessed rights of government by delegation, when normally developed they were not self-centred like the corporate colonies. This arose from the fact that the proprietor, and not the freemen organized in general court, was the grantee of authority. This gave rise to a mixed system. There was in their constitution an hereditary and a monarchical element, and their officials were for the most part appointive. In the transmission of political power from the proprietors to the colonists commissions and instructions were regularly used. The provinces were to a greater or less degree governed from a centre outside themselves and by officials who were independent of the colonists. By virtue of their structure, and so far as the settlers were concerned, the provinces were not in the full sense self-governing. The degree of self-government which their inhabitants enjoyed was limited by the large executive powers of the proprietor and his officials. It resembled that

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which was possessed by the localities in England. The province was not self-centred as was the New England colony.

The extent, however, to which this was true varied greatly in the different provinces. In New Netherland, New York, and Maryland the power of the executive reached a maximum, though local institutions in these provinces attained a considerable growth. In South Carolina claims quite as sweeping were urged on behalf of the proprietors, and, owing to natural rather than political causes, local government remained very imperfectly developed. Owing to the neglect of the proprietors, institutions in North Carolina were fashioned chiefly by the colonists themselves. The weakness of the proprietary title of Berkeley and Carteret and the liberal spirit of Penn had much the same result in East Jersey and Pennsylvania; while the increase in the number of resident proprietors, combined with their employment of election as almost the sole method of filling offices, resulted virtually in a system of popular government in West Jersey.

The meaning of this is, that in the provinces wide departures from the model of the county palatine frequently appear. The claims of the proprietors were not always made good; their programme of monarchical or even autocratic government they were by no means always able to carry through. Some of them did not attempt so to do, but granted away many of their chartered or territorial rights at the outset. The result was that, in the relations between the proprietary executives and the people of the provinces, as organized in their legislatures or in their institutions of local government, there was much variety. The variety was as great in this respect as it was in any feature of the proprietary policy. It ranged through all the stages from the autocratic system of New York to the practical reproduction in West Jersey of the corporate colony with its dominant legislature. Moreover, as time passed, the colonists, through their legislatures and their county governments, gradually defined and restricted the powers of the executive in all the provinces. In this way the balance between the two chief elements in the provincial

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systems was slowly but steadily shifted. It was in no way possible, under so many proprietary grants, to secure uniformity of development. Various combinations and adjustments were effected, by which the colonists obtained a large share of power; and though the proprietor and his body of appointed officials were almost everywhere present, their power was often shadowy.

In their relations with the king, however, the proprietary provinces were nearly as independent as were the corporate colonies. None of them, except Pennsylvania, were under obligation to submit their laws to the crown for its approval. The administration of the oath of allegiance to their inhabitants was by no means universal. Agents were only rarely despatched to England. The obligation to send cases on appeal to the privy council had not yet been imposed upon them. In some of the provinces, but not in all, justice was administered in the name of the king. Their ecclesiastical polities were varied and were by no means in agreement with the pretensions of the Anglicans. But, speaking generally, it may be said that in ideals, as well as in forms of government, the provinces and their people approximated more closely to the England of that time than did the Puritans and Puritan colonies of New England. Separatism in religion, with the moral intensity which accompanied it, erected a barrier between New England and the mother country which did not exist between her and the provinces. In form of government the resemblance between the normally developed province and the English monarchy as it existed in the seventeenth century is clear. In the case of the corporate colonies the analogy fails, and the predominance of their general courts resulted in a system which in its main outlines was more like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the supremacy of parliament had been fully established and acknowledged.

The analogy between the century which we have been studying and the Saxon period in the history of England is in its main outlines striking and true. Both were periods of origins. Under the Saxons the foundations of English institutions—particularly those of the localities—were laid. An

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ecclesiastical system was developed to which, in its essential spirit, England always remained true. The kingship in its broad outlines, though with much less than its later power, appeared as a feature of the constitution. At the close of the period the conditions out of which a nationality might grow were in existence, but a common experience, much enlarged and prolonged, must follow before the nation could be said to have attained a real existence. When, in later times, the nation was brought into conflict with its executive and had to defend itself against the wide-reaching claims of the kingship, with sure instinct it looked back on the centuries before the Norman Conquest as those when the foundations of its liberties were laid. It even idealized those centuries and fondly spoke of them and their achievements as constituting the inheritance, the treasured liberties, of the English people. It is true that this view of the period was exaggerated, that it failed to take into account a multitude of qualifying circumstances. Development in those times was crude, and the so-called liberties of locality or nation were in most cases inadequately guarantied. But notwithstanding this fact, a trend toward national and local independence was established in this period which was not lost during the entire subsequent course of English history.

The same assertion can upon clearer evidence be made concerning the first century of American history. In that period the foundations of American liberty were laid. In their main outlines American institutions, both local and colonial, were fashioned. They developed under American far more than under European conditions. They bore in a large sense the stamp of independence and self-sufficiency, which was the natural result of the remoteness of the colonies and of their isolation. In New England a type of political theory was developed which was a natural expression of the leading facts in their political existence. It is true that the permanence of colonial institutions, in the form which they had assumed, was not expressly guarantied by the sovereign power to which the colonies stood in the relation of dependencies. But their slow and natural growth, their adaptation to the needs and the spirit of the people for whom they

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existed, furnished guaranties more effective than any which mere statutes or written constitutions could give. The remoteness of the colonies from Europe operated also as a natural guaranty of fundamental importance. These all told in favor of the practical, though not of the legal, validity of the claims which the colonies early put forth to the exclusive power of self-taxation, in some cases even to the sole right of legislation as well. If at any time the acquired rights of self-government of the colonies at large should be imperilled, that type of political theory which had its home in New England could easily be extended to fit conditions in the provinces. With the predisposition in favor of self-government which resulted from the conditions thus outlined, the colonists faced the home government and any plans of systematic imperial control which it might devise and seek to enforce.