ort, the tradition of
their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater
loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the
colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government
was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the
projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save
in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen
into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly
elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected,
sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the
Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.

[Sidenote: English control.]

With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference
on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The
superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and
Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the
Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was
included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to
themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost
America because he read the American despatches, which none of his
predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any
interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were
secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of
internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt
afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I
have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you
think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to
England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade.
It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she
might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own
products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture
in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the
mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small
import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of
smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain
was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the
Americans enjoyed as British subjec