as set in motion and a colonial legislature formed, having
two chambers nearly everywhere, like Parliament. The county, with the
same character as at present, was instituted later than the oldest towns
and parishes, but itself subsequently became, in thinly settled parts,
the unit of governmental organization and political action, being
divided into towns or parishes only gradually. Voting was subject to a
property qualification, in some colonies to a religious one also; but no
nobility of blood or title got foothold.

The relation of the colonial governments to England is a far more
perplexing matter. From the preceding chapters it appears that we may
distinguish the colonies, if we come down to about 1750, as either (1)
self-governing or charter colonies, in which liberty was most complete
and subjection to England little more than nominal; and (2)
non-self-governing, ruled, theoretically at any rate, in considerable
measure from outside themselves. Rhode Island and Connecticut made up
the former class. Of the latter there were two groups, the royal or
provincial, including New Hampshire, Massachusetts; New York, New
Jersey, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, and the proprietary, viz.,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

Yet we are to bear in mind that many important constitutional and
governmental changes had occurred by 1750. Massachusetts, as we have
seen, had ceased to be self-governing as at first, yet it retained a
charter which conferred large liberty. All the provincial colonies began
as proprietary, and all the proprietary were for a time provincial.

Under Andros, New England stretched from the St. Croix to Delaware Bay.
After 1689 the tendency in all parts of the country was strong toward
civil freedom, which, favored by the changes and apathy of proprietaries
and the ignorance and quarrels of the English ministry, gradually
rendered the other colonies in effect about as well off in this respect
as Rhode Island and Connecticut.

But unfortunately the legal limits and meaning of this freedom were
never determined. Had they been, our Revolution need not have come.
Monarchs continually attempted to stretch hither the royal prerogative,
but how far this was legal was not then, and never can be, decided. The
constitutional scope of a monarch's prerogative in England itself was
one of the great questions of the seventeenth century, and remained
serious and unsettled through the eighteenth. Applied to Ame