the city of Hartford today distributes little "charter 1 6 8 9 oaks" and certifies to the pedigree. The Rhode Island and Connecticut charters not having been surrendered, the law officers of the crown held that they still were good and valid. All attempts to destroy them had failed and of the attempts that were later made none was successful. Although the New England confederacy had been long-time feeble and was now dead, it had worked a new idea into the political system of the English colonies in Americathe combination of local self-government and union.

With James II. an exile from his kingdom and English William and Mary on the English throne, with Seth Aspirations Sothell seizing power in South Carolina, Nathaniel Bacon and rebellion in Virginia, John Coode and the associators' insurrection in Maryland, the picturesque and dramatic Leisler uprising in New York, and the overthrow of the Andros throne at Boston, it appears that there was an English revolution in America as well as in the mother island. On both sides of the Atlantic, events were working ill for the divine right of kings; the people and popular rights were gaining ground in their long controversy with arbitrary rule and royal prerogative. The comprehensive view of the tendency of English development in this period is as instructive and reassuring as the several incidents thereof are interesting. As has been pointed out in these pages, these English The Source of colonies were of three political forms, the corporate colony, the proprietary province, and the royal province. The proprietary form was essentially transitional. Through the other two were to be worked out the great questions of government by authority transmitted from the king through his agents down to the people, or drawn up from the people through representative legisla

Sovereignty

1 6 8 9 tures of their own choosing; imperial control or independence. Between these two ideas of the source of sovereignty there was an irrepressible conflict.

The Colonial
Tendency

way.

Although a complete colonial system had not been established and the attempts to enforce the navigation acts were spasmodic, the careful reader of this volume. has noticed a tendency in most of the English plantations in America to manage their own affairs in their own Thus Connecticut set up as a separate colony without asking the consent of England; Massachusetts absorbed New Hampshire and Maine and established her mint in the same independent fashion; the New England confederacy was formed without leave of the mother country or any recognition of her existence more pronounced than an allusion to "those sad distractions in England." From Massachusetts to Carolina, Englishmen in America were already piping the same air of theoretical exposition and of practical maintenance of what they thought to be their rights. Was this tendency toward independence seeming or real, incidental or intentional? Was it to be temporary or continuous ?

D

A

T the end of the seventeenth century, the Ameri- 1 6 3 4 can frontier had been pushed from the Atlantic 1 6 8 9 seaboard just beyond the "fall line," where the The English streams leave their rocky beds and, by a series of rapids Frontier or falls,

enter deeper channels.

At this line fish love to

linger, navigation has to stop, and waterpower be

comes

available to

industry; hence, preColumbian

village sites, postColumbian trading posts, and

Map of the English Colonies, Showing the "Fall Line"

modern cities and railways. But while the English colonists were thus appropriating the Atlantic seaboard, the

French followers of Cartier and Champlain were penetrat- 1 6 3 4 ing the western wilds and waters and setting up a New France that, by way of great lakes and great rivers, reached from gulf to gulf. In the Canadian forests were developed the coureurs de bois and the voyageurs, a Voyageur and hardy race that added much to the knowledge that the Missionary French had of the land for which they and the English were to fight. But even more important than these rangers of the woods and waters were the missionaries of the cross.

In 1618, Etienne Brulé, Champlain's interpreter, Brulé and returned from the Lake Superior country to Montreal Nicolet with an ingot of red copper and a description of the great lake and Jean Nicolet came from France to trade in furs. In 1634, Nicolet pushed his canoe through the strait of Mackinac and coasted along the shore of Lake Michigan as far as Green Bay. About this time, the influence of the Jesuits became supreme at Quebec and several of the most famous of the religious and educational institutions Jesuit of Canada were begun, the Jesuit college, the Hôtel Influence Dieu with its devoted hospital nuns, and the school for Indian converts at Sillery, on the river four or five miles above Quebec. The ship that brought the hospital nuns also brought a wealthy, young, and childless August, 1639 widow, Madame de la Peltrie. With her were Marie Guyard, better known today as Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, the mother superior of the Ursulines, and one or two other nuns, all of whom were soon at Sillery.

In this period also were begun the missions among the Huronia Huron tribes the central theme of many of the Jesuit relations. In 1634, Brébeuf, Daniel, and other priests accompanied a party of Hurons returning from Three Rivers to their distant country. The hostility of the Iroquois had left but one open route, up the Ottawa River, across Lake Nipissing, down French River, and along the shores of Georgian Bay, three hundred pathless leagues. After separation, one by one, weary and worn, they landed on the shores of Thunder Bay, a region in