Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/86

 54 Political conditions. [noo- boundary, with an indefinite right of extension westward. To this however there was one conspicuous exception. The eastern boundary of New York ran not at right angles to the Atlantic but along the left bank of the Hudson, and thus, running northward, blocked the expansion of the New England colonies by giving them a western frontier. New York may be regarded as an isolated projection running westward, and far beyond the normal line, as one may call it, of occupied territory. With that exception the colonies practically formed a belt along the coast, of less than a hundred miles across at its widest. If we divide the colonies by their constitutions they fall into three groups. Connecticut and Rhode Island were chartered colonies with extensive rights of self-government. The Crown exercised over them no regular and continuous control : it could only intervene in special cases and by exceptional process. Otherwise they were only subject to such restrictions as the Crown or Parliament might impose on the whole body of colonies. In Maryland and Pennsylvania administrative power was normally vested in the Proprietor, subject, as in the chartered colonies, to special intervention by the Crown. In the remaining eight colonies all administrative power was vested in the Crown and exercised through its nominees. Somewhat indefinite powers of legislation and taxation were enjoyed by all the colonies, in varying degrees, and exercised in popular assemblies of similar though not identical nature. The division by constitutions is however one of no great practical importance. A division which has far more real bearing on facts is one which has been already touched upon, namely, that which separates the colonies into a northern and a southern group, the former in some measure agricultural, but tending more and more to become commercial and industrial, and depending mainly on free labour; the latter purely agricultural and wholly dependent on some form of servile labour. We may go further and subdivide the northern colonies. New England, homogeneous in origin and principles, intensely definite in habits of thought and modes of life, stands on one side; on the other side are New York and the Quaker colonies, cosmopolitan and fluid, and lacking in that political and religious discipline which fashioned, for good and evil, the self-conscious and self-reliant New Englander. That exactness of method and organisation which marked the New England colonies enables us to ascertain with tolerable accuracy their population at successive stages of their growth. We shall probably be not far wrong if we set down the English-speaking population of New England at the accession of George I at about 90,000, of which Massachusetts contributed about half, Connecticut a fourth, and Rhode Island and New Hampshire the remainder in about equal proportions. Of the southern colonies we have no such statistics as warrant us in