was different. Neither the States General nor the Dutch West Indian Company had dealt with the New Netherlands to foster any spirit of loyalty, and it was with indifference that its people regarded the political changes that made them at one time owe allegiance to Holland and later to England. "Nothing could show more strongly the lack of any vigorous sense of nationality than the passivity with which the Dutch settlers suffered themselves to be handed backwards and forwards without protest or expression of interest." One cannot picture such a thing in Massachusetts or Virginia; it would be difficult to imagine those stubborn Puritans or those fiery Virginians tamely submitting to be treated as chattels and like fortresses or munitions of war the spoil of the conqueror. There would have been an uprising to tax all the energy of the United Provinces to suppress.

The marked difference in the character of the Dutch and the English and the proof, if additional proof is wanting, that it was the English and not the Dutch who laid the foundation of American psychology, is to be found in the political ties that bound the colonists to England, which led to their independence and their birth as a nation, as contrasted with the slight importance the New Netherland settlers attached to their political relationship to the home government. The Puritan settlers, Goldwin Smith, says, "in common with the other 1 Cambridge Modern History, vol. vii, p. 41.

colonists of the period, retained not only their love of the old land, but their political tie to it. They deemed themselves still liegemen of a sovereign on the other side of the Atlantic. This created a relation false from the beginning. Herein lay the fatal seeds of misunderstanding, of encroachment on the side of the home government, of revolt on that of the growing colony, and ultimately revolution”; and he goes on to say that "the English colony unhappily was a dependency, and when it grew strong enough to spurn dependence there was a bond to be broken which was not likely to be broken without violence and a breach of affection." It is to be regretted that such a clear thinker as Goldwin Smith should have failed to comprehend the exact nature of the relationship that existed between the English colonists and the mother country, the mental attitude of his countrymen both at home and in America, and the causes that produced the discontent of the colonists; and it is only with that knowledge that it becomes possible to understand why the Dutch accomplished nothing.

In previous chapters I have endeavored to correct the widespread but erroneous impression that the Englishman when he emigrated to America, whether as a Puritan colonist or a southern planter or landholder, divested himself of his nationality and ceased to remain an Englishman. But the truth is that in all things, political principles no less 1Smith: The United States, p. 6.

than in his manners and customs and his religion, he was as much the Englishman in Massachusetts or in Virginia as he had been in Lincolnshire or in Suffolk. These Englishmen did not merely "deem” themselves liegemen of a sovereign; they were. Because they lived in Virginia they were no less Englishmen than those of their kin who were still living in the ancestral halls of Kent; distance neither broke nor weakened the tie. It was because they were Englishmen, it was because they were Englishmen and had not ceased to be Englishmen, that they insisted upon the same rights and privileges, the same liberty, the same safeguards, the same political freedom that were enjoyed by Englishmen elsewhere, that inherently belonged to the Englishman whether he acknowledged allegiance to his sovereign in London or in Jamestown. In the Cambridge synod of 1646 the ministers defined the relations of Massachusetts toward England in these words: "We depend upon the state of England for protection and immunities of Englishmen." "The complaints of the people in the colonies," Straus says, “were at no time because of the form of their government, or that of the mother country, but because of the encroachments upon, and utter disregard of, the natural rights, privileges and immunities to which they deemed themselves entitled, equally with those residing in England.""

1 Adams: The Emancipation of Massachusetts, p. 90.

'Straus: The Origin of Republican Form of Government in the United States of America, p. 3.

We have seen that in the colonies, almost from the very beginning, there were continual uprisings of the people to resist the encroachments of their governors or to assert their prerogatives; they were defiant not only of the local authorities but of the Crown itself when they believed themselves the victims of oppression or tyranny. But it created no false relation; it was, on the contrary, a relation perfectly understood and perfectly satisfactory according to the spirit of the age; and of all things the historian must avoid the error of visualizing the past by the false light of the present-false because modern clearness of thought magnifies and distorts; it is too cruelly keen to make allowances for only a partially developed concept of the philosophy which men once accepted as final. Bacon's rebellion, for example, was no more an effort to "spurn dependence" than the uprising led by Wat Tyler was an attempt to make Kent or Hartfordshire independent principalities; but both were the expression of popular discontent and were the only means then known to correct grievances, to readjust a burdensome and unjust system of taxation, and to secure the reaffirmation of rights which were the immemorial privileges of Englishmen. Just as Tyler rode at the head of his motley rabble three centuries before Bacon aroused the spirit of Virginia, so Cromwell marshaled his hosts nearly a century before Washington created an army. In searching for a precedent the Englishmen of America found

the Grand Remonstrance framed by the Puritans of England, and they indicted their sovereign with the Declaration of Independence. But in neither case was it a deliberate attempt to break a bond because it was politically galling. An English sovereign lost his head because he defied the liberties of the people and attempted to set up an autocracy; a later English sovereign lost his colonies because he was deaf to remonstrance and clung to the exploded idea that Englishmen might be taxed without their consent. In the time of Cromwell England was in spirit a republic. The English colonies had long been republican not alone in spirit but in the form of their governments, and in that mood it needed only a choice bit of rhetoric to make them cast out even the semblance of monarchical institutions and openly embrace that form of government for which their training and their natural inclinations had for so long prepared them.

Returning to those Dutch settlers who planted themselves on the Hudson, we see how they differed from the men of English stock who rooted themselves in the North. While English governors and their courts were ruling with a firm and, in many cases, oppressive hand, which made men more determined than ever to resist encroachments and widen their liberty, Dutch stadtholders were engaged in the ridiculous pastime of governing by paper proclamations, which appealed to stolid