Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the full the spirit of colonial independence. Their founders, men of the strongest English type, went out to live in their own way, to be free from restrictions which trammelled them at home, to found small English-speaking commonwealths which should be self-governing and self-supporting, ordered from within, not from without. [Sidenote: When the English colonies were planted in North America there was the most complete absence of system at home.] The English have never been systematic or continuous in their policy throughout their history; but the period of English history when North America was colonized was the one of all others when system and continuity were most conspicuously absent. It was a time of violent political changes at home, of strife between king and people. A line of kings was brought in from Scotland, they were overturned, they were restored, and they were finally driven out again. This was the condition of the Crown to which the newly-planted colonies owed allegiance, and which was supposed to exercise supreme authority over the colonies. Under the Crown were Proprietors and Companies, whose charters, being derived from a perpetually disputed source, were a series of dissolving views; and under the Proprietors and Companies were a number of strong English citizens who, caring little for the theoretical basis of their position, cared very much for practical independence, and ordered their ways accordingly, becoming steadily and stubbornly more independent through perpetual friction and perpetual absence of systematic control. Thus it was that the North American colonies drank in, as their mother’s milk, the traditions and the habits of independence. They carried with them English citizenship, but the privileges of such citizenship rather than the responsibilities; and, in so far as the mother country was inclined to ignore the privileges, the colonies were glad to disclaim the responsibilities. [Sidenote: Absence of collective responsibility in the British North American colonies.]