gious struggles. In the
following century political and economic interests pressed into the
foreground of historical movement. The democratic institutions of the
colonies were repeatedly in opposition to those of the mother-country,
and the ties that bound them to her lost more and more of their
significance. The great antagonism of their economic interests began to
make itself widely felt. The economic prosperity of the colonies
demanded the least possible restriction upon free movement. Finally they
felt that they were ruled not by their old home but by a foreign
country.

Then the old Puritan and Independent conceptions became effective in a
new direction. The theory of the social compact which played so
important a role in the founding of the colonies, and had helped to
establish religious liberty, now supported in the most significant way
the reconstruction of existing institutions. Not that it changed these
institutions, it simply gave them a new basis.

The colonists had brought over the ocean with them their liberties and
rights as English-born subjects. In a series of charters from the
English kings it was specifically stated that the colonists and their
descendants should enjoy all the rights which belonged to Englishmen in
their native land.[97] Even before the English Bill of Rights the most
of the colonies had enacted laws in which the ancient English liberties
were gathered together.[98] There occurred, however, in the second half
of the eighteenth century a great transformation in these old rights.
The inherited rights and liberties, as well as the privileges of
organization, which had been granted the colonists by the English kings
or had been sanctioned by the colonial lords, do not indeed change in
word, but they become rights which spring not from man but from God and
Nature.

To these ancient rights new ones were added. With the conviction that
there existed a right of conscience independent of the State was found
the starting-point for the determination of the inalienable rights of
the individual. The theory of a Law of Nature recognized generally but
one natural right of the individual--liberty or property. In the
conceptions of the Americans, however, in the eighteenth century there
appears a whole series of such rights.

The teaching of Locke, the theories of Pufendorf[99] and the ideas of
Montesquieu, all powerfully influenced the political views of the
Americans of that time. But the setti