a part of the
proceeds they later built manors which were contemplated as wonderful
and magnificent. Surrounded and served by their retainers, agents,
vassal tenants and slaves, they lived in princely and licentious style,
knowing no law in most matters except their unrestrained will. They
beheld themselves as ingenious and memorable founders of a potential
landed aristocracy whose possessions were more extended than that of
Europe. Wilderness much of it still was, but obviously the time was
coming when the population would be fairly abundant. The laws of entail
and primogeniture, then in full force, would operate to keep the estates
intact and gifted with inherent influence for generations.

Along with their landed estates, these directors had a copious inflowing
revenue. The Dutch West India Company was in a thriving condition. By
the year 1629 it had more than one hundred full-rigged ships in
commission. Most of them were fitted out for war on the commerce of
other countries or on pirates. Fifteen thousand seamen and soldiers were
on its payroll; in that one year it used more than one hundred thousand
pounds of powder--significant of the grim quality of business done. It
had more than four hundred cannon and thousands of other destructive
weapons.[5] Anything conducive to profit, no matter if indiscriminate
murder, was accepted as legitimate and justifiable functions of trade,
and was imposed alike upon royalty, which shared in the proceeds, and
upon the people at large. The energetic trading class, concentrated in
the one effort of getting money, and having no scruples as to the means
in an age when ideals were low and vulgar, had already begun to make
public opinion in many countries, although this public opinion counted
for little among submissive peoples. It was the king and the governing
class, either or both, whose favor and declarations counted; and so long
as these profited by the devious extortions and villainies of trade the
methods were legitimatized, if not royally sanctified.

AN ARISTOCRACY SOLIDLY GROUNDED.

A more potentially robust aristocracy than that which was forming in New
Netherlands could hardly be imagined. Resting upon gigantic gifts of
land, with feudal accompaniments, it held a monopoly, or nearly one, of
the land's resources. The old aristocracy of Holland grew jealous of the
power and pretensions of what it frowned upon as an upstart trading
clique and tried to curtail the rights and