Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/79

 English settlers had encroached upon Dutch territory and, due to a number of ruinous treaties made by the Dutch governors, the English finally found themselves in possession of land that legally was not theirs.

The English kept up a direct communication with the homeland and a change of administration in England quickly made its influence felt here. The Stuarts had been, for the most part, wise monarchs in the handling of colonial affairs; and the governors whom they sent to America were, with some notable exceptions, liberal minded men who were not disposed to rule in an arbitrary fashion, nor were they ordered to do so by the Stuart kings. The real ruling bodies in the English colonies were the general assemblies; and though this seemed at times to operate more in theory than in fact, a way was generally found for a colony to get rid of an over-bearing governor. For this reason a feeling of freedom and self exertion grew up in the English colonies, encouraging the settlers there to push back the frontier toward the fertile lands of the west.

On the other hand the government of Holland had but a loose connection with New Netherland, persisting in the belief that the colony existed merely for trading purposes; it left the appointment of the governors mainly in the hands of the great trading companies, particularly of the Dutch West India Company, which, as we have pointed out in the case of when the Remonstrance was presented in Holland, guarded their prerogative with an almost absurd formality. The trading companies made the still greater mistake in their persistence that the essential qualities of a Dutch governor consisted of a disposition toward arbitrary rule, obstinacy and lack of ability to compromise; whereas what was actually needed was a man of the opposite type. In every instance the four Dutch governors of New Netherland were men of this kind—arbitrary, un-