e Hudson and about Delaware Bay, respectively.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Swedes had been dispossessed
by the Dutch, who in turn had succumbed to the English. And in 1756 began
the great struggle between France and England for the possession of the
Mississippi Valley. England won, and the existence of the United States as
we know and love it became a possibility.

THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTION.

The causes of the Revolutionary War fall naturally into two great classes,
the remote and the immediate.

The Remote Causes.--Among the underlying causes of the war may be
mentioned the following:

1. _The location of the colonies._ They were separated from the mother
country by a great ocean, which then seemed many times as wide as it does
now. Communication was so infrequent that the authorities in England could
not keep track of what was going on in America, and misgovernment could
flourish unchecked because unknown. And so far away and so differently
circumstanced from the people in England were the people of the colonies
that the former could not appreciate the real needs of the latter.

2. _The character of the colonists._ Character is the product largely of
ancestry and circumstances. The ancestors of these people, after a
struggle lasting hundreds of years, had established liberty in England and
intrenched it in guarantees the wisest ever devised by man. From them the
colonists inherited the right of freedom from arbitrary arrest; of giving
bail in ordinary offenses; of a speedy, public trial by jury, near the
place where the crime was alleged to have been committed; of the writ of
habeas corpus; of established rules of evidence; and, indeed, of nearly
all the rights mentioned in the first ten amendments to the constitution
of the United States. Their ancestors had, in the war between Cromwell and
Charles I., laid down their lives to establish the principle that taxes
can be laid only by the people or by their representatives. The colonists
themselves had been compelled to face difficulties incident to life in a
new country, and had developed the power to act independently in matters
pertaining to their individual good. And in the management of their
several commonwealths they had gained considerable experience in
governmental affairs. With such ancestry and such experience they would
not tamely endure being imposed upon.

3. _The character of the king._ On the death of Queen Anne without an
he