interested in trade and
commerce with all parts of the Atlantic world. Towns grew into larger
towns and cities; and Portsmouth, Newbury, Salem, Marblehead, Boston,
Newport, New London, Hartford, Wethersfield, Middletown, New Haven,
Fairfield, and Stamford became, in varying degrees, centers of an
increasing population and of new business interests that brought New
England into closer contact with the other colonies, with the West
Indies, and with the Old World. England became involved in the long
struggle with France and not only called on the colonies to aid her in
military campaigns against the French in America, but endeavored to
bring them within the scope of her colonial empire. All these influences
tended to expand the life of New England and to force its people more
and more out of their isolation. Yet, despite this fact, the Puritan
colonies--Connecticut and Rhode Island especially--continued to lie in
large part outside the pale of British control and example, and their
inhabitants continued to accept religion and the Puritan standards of
morals as the guide of their daily lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The standard authority on the subjects treated in the volume is J. G.
Palfrey, _History of New England_, 5 vols. (1858-1864, 1875-1890), a
work of broad scholarship and written in a not uninteresting style, but
indiscriminating in its defense of Massachusetts and without any
understanding of the purpose and attitude of the English authorities. In
somewhat the same class are G. E. Ellis, _The Puritan Age_ (1888), a dry
book but less given to special pleading, and Justin Winsor, _The
Memorial History of Boston_, 4 vols. (1880-1882), a series of essays
with elaborate notes and bibliographies, presenting in a fragmentary way
the conventional view of the period. Less frankly favorable to New
England is J. A. Doyle, _English Colonies in America: The Puritan
Colonies_, 2 vols. (1887), a work of value, but diffuse in style and
often confused in treatment, and, though written by an Englishman,
displaying little interest in the English side of the story. The
chapters in Edward Channing, _History of the United States_, vol. i
(1905), that relate to the subject, are scholarly and always
interesting; while those in H. L. Osgood, _The American Colonies in the
Seventeenth Century_, 3 vols. (1904-1907), contain the ablest accounts
we have of the institutional characteristics of the period.

There are few good historie