licts in the towns,
especially in the eighteenth century,[75:1] over the ownership and
disposal of the common lands.

The new settlements, by a process of natural selection, would afford
opportunity to the least contented, whether because of grievances, or
ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western
flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original
ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity to make
new settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic and
political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the
conditions under which new towns could be established, this became more
possible.

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the seventeenth
century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, and 1727,
Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating towns in advance of
settlement, to protect her boundary claims. In 1736 she laid out five
towns near the New Hampshire border, and a year earlier opened four
contiguous towns to connect her Housatonic and Connecticut Valley
settlements.[76:1] Grants in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to
old towns, the proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to
move.

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increasing
importance of the economic factor. At a time when Connecticut feared
that Andros might dispose of the public lands to the disadvantage of the
colony, the legislature granted a large part of Western Connecticut to
the towns of Hartford and Windsor, _pro forma_, as a means of
withdrawing the lands from his hands. But these towns refused to give up
the lands after the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of
them.[76:2] Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to
assert possession, and the matter was at length compromised in 1719 by
allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the town grants,
while the colony reserved the larger part of northwestern Connecticut.
In 1737 the colony disposed of its last unlocated lands by sale in lots.
In 1762 Massachusetts sold a group of entire townships in the Berkshires
to the highest bidders.[77:1]

But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded by the
"New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, chiefly in the years
about 1760, made grants of a hundred and thirty towns west of the
Connecticut, in what is now the State of Vermont, but which was then in