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out ten thousand inhabitants. Their rulers were just, wise, and of a mind truly to serve the people. Here none were persecuted for their faith. Education was universal. Few were poor, none very rich. Nearly all supplies were of domestic production, nothing as yet being exported but a few cattle. Under the second Charles Rhode Island fared quite as well as Connecticut. This was remarkable, inasmuch as the little colony of three thousand souls, in their four towns of Providence, Newport, Portsmouth, and Warwick, insisted on "holding forth the lively experiment"--and it proved lively indeed--"of full liberty in religious concernments." Charles did not oppose this, and Clarendon favored it, a motive of both here, as with Connecticut, being to rear in New England a power friendly to the Crown, that should rival and check Massachusetts. Both these commonwealths were granted absolute independence in all but name. No oath of allegiance to the king was demanded. Appeals to England were not provided for. [1680] Though having no quarrel with the king, the two southern colonies were not without their trials. Connecticut, besides continual fear of the Dutch and the Indians, was much agitated by the controversy over the question whether children of moral parents not church members should be baptized, a question at length settled affirmatively by the so-called Half-Way Covenant. It also had its boundary disputes with Massachusetts, with Rhode Island--for Connecticut took the Narragansett River of its charter to be the bay of that name--and with New York, which, by the Duke of York's new patent, issued on the recovery of that province from the Dutch in 1674, reached the Connecticut River. During England's war with Holland, 1672-74, all the colonies stood in some fear of Dutch attacks. [1685] Rhode Island had worse troubles than Connecticut. It, too, had boundary disputes, serious and perpetual; but graver by much were its internal feuds, caused partly by the mutual jealousy of its four towns, partly by the numerous and jarring religious persuasions here represented. Government was painfully feeble. Only with utmost difficulty could the necessary taxes be raised. Warwick in particular was for some time in arrears to John Clark, of Newport, for his invaluable services in securing the charter of 1663. Quakers and the divers sorts of Baptists valiantly warred each against other, using, with dreadful address, those most deadly o
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