i. and viii.). The
second is the great waste of money and the awful sacrifice of human
life caused by the failure of the colonizers to adapt themselves to
the conditions of life in America. That the people of Virginia should
be fed on grain brought from England, should build their houses in a
swamp, should spend their feeble energies in military executions of
one another is an unhappy story made none the pleasanter by the
knowledge that the founders of the company in England were spending
freely of their substance and their effort on the colony. The third
element in the growth of Virginia is the introduction of the staple
crop, always in demand, and adapted to the soil of Virginia. Tobacco,
after 1616, speedily became the main interest of Virginia, and without
tobacco it must have gone down. A fourth characteristic is the early
evidence of an unconquerable desire for self-government, brought out
in the movements of the first assembly of 1619 and the later colonial
government: here we have the germ of the later American system of
government.

The founding of the neighboring colony of Maryland (chapters vii. and
viii.) marks the first of the proprietary colonies; it followed by
twenty-five years and had the advantage of the unhappy experience of
Virginia and of very capable management. The author shows how little
Maryland deserves the name of a Catholic colony, and he develops the
Kent Island episode, the first serious boundary controversy between
two English commonwealths in America.

To the two earliest New England colonies are devoted five chapters
(ix. to xiii.), which are treated not as a separate episode but as
part of the general spirit of colonization. Especial attention is paid
to the development of popular government in Massachusetts, where the
relation between governor, council, and freemen had an opportunity to
work itself out. Through the transfer of the charter to New England,
America had its first experience of a plantation with a written
constitution for internal affairs. The fathers of the Puritan
republics are further relieved of the halo which generations of
venerating descendants have bestowed upon them, and appear as human
characters. Though engaging in a great and difficult task, and while
solving many problems, they nevertheless denied their own fundamental
precept of the right of a man to worship God according to the dictates
of his own conscience.

Chapters xiv. to xvi. describe the foundation