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 -1750] Economical conditions. 55 hazarding a conjecture. All that we can say is that in the middle colonies the negroes were to the whites in the proportion of about one to seven; in Maryland and Virginia of one to three; while in South Carolina they formed a majority. In race, as in other respects, the New England colonies were by far the most homogeneous portion of the colonies. French Huguenots and Irish Presbyterians occasionally settled in Massachusetts ; and among the former were the founders of more than one prosperous house of business ; but there was no appreciable influx of any alien element. In the middle colonies, on the other hand, over and above the original Swedish and Dutch populations, there were waves of immigration from Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, and Wales. In Virginia and Maryland we find no trace of any foreign element, though doubtless there were individual foreign settlers. But the Carolinas were largely peopled by French Huguenots, by Swiss, by refugees from the Palatinate, and during the eighteenth century by Scottish and Irish immigrants. In the northern colonies slavery was a mere excrescence, exercising no perceptible influence over industry or social life. Probably in 1700 there were not 6000 slaves in the whole territory between the Kennebec and Long Island. For the negro slave can only fulfil one of two functions. He may be the appendage of a luxurious establishment, or he may be the instrument of a monotonous and unintelligent form of tillage where labour can be organised in large gangs. In New England neither of these conditions existed. Luxury, except at Boston, was unknown. Farms were small, and the sterility of the soil necessitated intelligent and diversified tillage. In New York, on the other hand, the rich merchant could find place for a retinue of domestic slaves ; and the landowner growing corn on a large scale could make use of unskilled labour. Further south, in the tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland, negro-slavery was no doubt, if one sets aside moral and social considerations, the most effective and economical system of labour ; and, as the black was more efficient than the indented white servant and less likely to organise resistance of any kind, negro-slavery rapidly obtained the ascendancy over the earlier system. It is also noteworthy that, whereas slaves were proportionately fewer in New York than in the southern colonies, yet they were evidently objects of greater dread. The legislative restraints imposed upon them were more severe. In the South we never hear of anything like an organised servile insurrection ; but in New York there were negro insurrections in 1712 and 1741. In both cases houses were burnt, and in both the offenders were punished with great severity, some being broken on the wheel or burned alive. Men have often written and spoken as though the economical development of the colonies had been stifled by the narrow and selfish policy of the mother-country. It is no doubt true that English CH. II.