ies, franchises, and immunities of free
denizens and natural subjects within any of our other dominions, to
all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within
this our realm of England, or in any other of our dominions. This
principle, that British subjects born in America should be entitled to
the same political freedom as if born in England, was one upon which
the colonists always insisted, and it was the repeated and persistent
attempts of George III. to infringe it that led the American colonies
to revolt and declare themselves independent of Great Britain.

[Sidenote: Dissolution of the two companies.]
[Sidenote: Settlement of the three zones.]
Both the companies founded in 1606 were short-lived. In 1620 the
Plymouth Company got a new charter, which made it independent of the
London Company. In 1624 the king, James I., quarreled with the London
Company, brought suit against it in court, and obtained from the
subservient judges a decree annulling its charter. In 1635 the
reorganized Plymouth Company surrendered its charter to Charles I.
in pursuance of a bargain which need not here concern us.[1] But the
creation of these short-lived companies left an abiding impression
upon the map of North America and upon the organization of civil
government in the United States. Let us observe what was done with the
three strips or zones into which the country was divided: the northern
or New England zone, assigned to the Plymouth Company; the southern or
Virginia zone, assigned to the London Company; and the central zone,
for which the two companies were, so to speak, to run a race.

[Footnote 1: See my _Beginnings of New England_, p. 112.]

[Sidenote: 1. the northern zone.]
[Sidenote: 2. The southern zone.]
In 1663 Charles II. cut off the southern part of Virginia, the area
covering the present states of North and South Carolina and Georgia,
and it was formed into a new province called Carolina. In 1729 the
two groups of settlements which had grown up along its coast were
definitively separated into North and South Carolina; and in 1732
the frontier portion toward Florida was organized into the colony of
Georgia. Thus four of the original thirteen states--Virginia, the two
Carolinas, and Georgia--were constituted in the southern zone.

To this group some writers add Maryland, founded in 1632, because its
territory had been claimed by the London Company; but the earliest
settlements in Maryland, its princ