of varieties of type was from the outset a distinguishing note, and the
home authorities neither desired nor attempted to impose a strict
uniformity with the rules and methods existing in England. There was as
great a variety in social and economic organisation as in religious
beliefs between the aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the
democratic agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only
was there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing
institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None,
indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New
Englanders. They came out organised as religious congregations, in
which every member possessed equal rights, and they took the
congregational system as the basis of their local government, and
church membership as the test of citizenship; nor did any other
colonies attain the right, long exercised by the New Englanders, of
electing their own governors. But there was no English settlement, not
even the little slave-worked plantations in the West Indian islands,
like Barbados, which did not set up, as a matter of course, a
representative body to deal with problems of legislation and taxation,
and the home government never dreamt of interfering with this practice.
Already in 1650, the English empire was sharply differentiated from the
Spanish, the Dutch, and the French empires by the fact that it
consisted of a scattered group of self-governing communities, varying
widely in type, but united especially by the common possession of free
institutions, and thriving very largely because these institutions
enabled local needs to be duly considered and attracted settlers of
many types.

(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713

The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of systematic
imperial policy on the part of both England and France; for both
countries now realised that in the profitable field of commerce, at any
rate, the Dutch had won a great advantage over them.

France, after many internal troubles and many foreign wars, had at last
achieved, under the government of Louis XIV., the boon of firmly
established order. She was now beyond all rivalry the greatest of the
European states, and her king and his great finance minister, Colbert,
resolved to win for her also supremacy in trade and colonisation. But
this was to be done absolutely under the control and direction of the
central gover