British America
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Puritan ‘New England’, lay a little wedge, on the valley of the River Hudson, which had been settled by the Dutch. There was no gold in North America, and, except tobacco, no rich natural crop; but there was a virgin soil of great fertility, vast forests full of valuable timber, swarms of fur-bearing animals like beavers, and splendid fisheries on the coasts. So these peoples rapidly grew into rich and prosperous little states, working, in a climate not unlike that of Europe, at the same sort of work that their fathers had known across the ocean.
Temper of the Colonists.But many of the colonies were full of Puritans and Protestant Dissenters, the very men who, in King Charles I’s reign, had fought against the Crown. So there was born, in all our colonists, a spirit of resistance to government in general, and the quite foolish notion that all government is oppressive. Such a spirit might easily lead to rebellion. The colonists, however, knew well that all round them were Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Spaniards, casting greedy eyes on their riches, and that against these foes only the English fleet could protect them. So some sort of pretence of loyalty to their Mother Country was for many years almost a necessity to them. The Mother Country usually left them to themselves; it never taxed them; Government of the Colonies.it sent them Governors, who hoisted a British flag outside their houses, and ‘took the lead in Society’, but did little other governing. Each colony set up a miniature House of Commons, or something like it, of its own, and made its own laws on the English model. On one thing only England insisted, that the colonists were to buy their goods wholly from English merchants; and if they produced any goods which England wanted and could