wn
making.

[Sidenote: The four New England colonies.]

In the middle of the eighteenth century there were four New England
colonies. Massachusetts extended her sway over Maine, and the Green
Mountain territory was an uninhabited wilderness, to which New York and
New Hampshire alike laid claim. The four commonwealths of New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all been in existence,
under one form or another, for more than a century. The men who were in
the prime of life there in 1750 were the great-grandsons and
great-great-grandsons of the men who crossed the ocean between 1620 and
1640 and settled New England. Scarcely two men in a hundred were of other
than English blood. About one in a hundred could say that his family
came from Scotland or the north of Ireland; one in five hundred may have
been the grandchild of a Huguenot. Upon religious and political
questions these people thought very much alike. Extreme poverty was
almost unknown, and there were but few who could not read and write. As
a rule every head of a family owned the house in which he lived and the
land which supported him. There were no cities; and from Boston, which
was a town with 16,000 inhabitants, down to the smallest settlement in
the White Mountains, the government was carried on by town-meetings at
which, almost any grown-up man could be present and speak and vote.
Except upon the sea-coast nearly all the people lived upon farms; but
all along the coast were many who lived by fishing and by building
ships, and in the towns dwelt many merchants grown rich by foreign
trade. In those days Massachusetts was the richest of the thirteen
colonies, and had a larger population than any other except Virginia.
Connecticut was then more populous than New York; and when the four New
England commonwealths acted together--as was likely to be the case in
time of danger--they formed the strongest military power on the American
continent.

[Sidenote: Virginia and Maryland]

Among what we now call southern states there were two that in 1750 were
more than a hundred years old. These were Virginia and Maryland. The
people of these commonwealths, like those of New England, had lived
together in America long enough to become distinctively Americans. Both
New Englander and Virginian had had time to forget their family
relationships with the kindred left behind so long ago in England;
though there were many who did not forget it, an