When an over-sea colony is founded, the new settlement is in effect most distant from the old country; that is to say, means of communication between the one point and the other are least frequent and least developed. The tendency to separation--as far as geography is concerned--is therefore strongest at the outset. On the other hand, in the foundation of a colony, unless the foundation is due to political disruption at home, the sentiment towards the mother country is warmer and closer than in after years, for the founders remember where they were born and where they grew to manhood. As generations go on, the tie of sentiment becomes necessarily weaker, but, with better communication, distance becomes less; there is therefore a competition between the opposing tendencies. Many of the Greek colonies were the result of στάσις or division in the mother cities. The unsuccessful party went out and made a separate home. In a very modified form the same cause was at work in the founding of the Puritan colonies of North America. Notably, the emigrants on the _Mayflower_ were already exiles from England, political refugees, who had found a temporary home in the Netherlands. These founders of the Plymouth settlement were by no means the chief colonizers of North America, or even of New England, but their story--the story of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’--became a nucleus of Puritan tradition; and from it after generations deduced that New England was the home of English citizens whom England had cast out. Thus one group, at any rate, of North American colonies traced their origin to separation. Then came the element of distance. ‘The European colonies in America,’ wrote Adam Smith, with some exaggeration, ‘are more remote than the most distant provinces of the greatest empires which had ever been known before.’[22] The Atlantic Ocean lay between them and the motherland, and cycles went by before that distance was perceptibly modified. In our own time, steam and telegraphy have been perpetually counteracting the effects of distance. It was not so in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Navigation was improved, but was still the humble handmaid of wind and tide; and on the very eve of the American War of Independence the remoteness of the North American colonies, and the prevailing ignorance in England about the North American colonies were, though no doubt much exaggerated, a commonplace among the speakers and writers of the time. We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation, and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at a time when distance did not grow less. [Sidenote: General view of the duty of a mother country towards its colonies.]