out ten thousand
inhabitants. Their rulers were just, wise, and of a mind truly to serve
the people. Here none were persecuted for their faith. Education was
universal. Few were poor, none very rich. Nearly all supplies were of
domestic production, nothing as yet being exported but a few cattle.

Under the second Charles Rhode Island fared quite as well as
Connecticut. This was remarkable, inasmuch as the little colony of three
thousand souls, in their four towns of Providence, Newport, Portsmouth,
and Warwick, insisted on "holding forth the lively experiment"--and it
proved lively indeed--"of full liberty in religious concernments."
Charles did not oppose this, and Clarendon favored it, a motive of both
here, as with Connecticut, being to rear in New England a power friendly
to the Crown, that should rival and check Massachusetts. Both these
commonwealths were granted absolute independence in all but name. No
oath of allegiance to the king was demanded. Appeals to England were not
provided for.

[1680]

Though having no quarrel with the king, the two southern colonies were
not without their trials. Connecticut, besides continual fear of the
Dutch and the Indians, was much agitated by the controversy over the
question whether children of moral parents not church members should be
baptized, a question at length settled affirmatively by the so-called
Half-Way Covenant. It also had its boundary disputes with Massachusetts,
with Rhode Island--for Connecticut took the Narragansett River of its
charter to be the bay of that name--and with New York, which, by the
Duke of York's new patent, issued on the recovery of that province from
the Dutch in 1674, reached the Connecticut River. During England's war
with Holland, 1672-74, all the colonies stood in some fear of Dutch
attacks.

[1685]

Rhode Island had worse troubles than Connecticut. It, too, had boundary
disputes, serious and perpetual; but graver by much were its internal
feuds, caused partly by the mutual jealousy of its four towns, partly by
the numerous and jarring religious persuasions here represented.
Government was painfully feeble. Only with utmost difficulty could the
necessary taxes be raised. Warwick in particular was for some time in
arrears to John Clark, of Newport, for his invaluable services in
securing the charter of 1663. Quakers and the divers sorts of Baptists
valiantly warred each against other, using, with dreadful address, those
most deadly o