They would rather have turned their thoughts to other things. There were home matters of deep moment which they were uneasy to settle. But these larger matters, of England’s place and power in the world, dominated them whether they would or no. King William’s War was but the forerunner of many more, of the same meaning and portent. Wars vexed and disciplined them for half a century, and their separate interests had often to stand neglected for years together in order that their common interests and the interests of English empire in America might be guarded. [Illustration: COURIER DU BOIS, XVII. CENTURY] And yet those who were thoughtful did not lose sight of the great, though subtle, gain which came with the vexing losses of war, to offset them. They had not failed to notice and to take to heart what had happened in England when William and Mary were brought to the throne. They were none the less Englishmen for being out of England, and what Parliament did for English liberty deeply concerned them. Parliament, as all the world knew, had done a great deal during those critical days in which it had consummated the “glorious revolution” by which the Stuarts were once for all put from the seat of sovereignty. It had reasserted the ancient rights named in Magna Charta; it had done away with the King’s arrogated right to tax; it had destroyed his alleged right to set laws aside, or alter them in any way; it had reduced him from being master and had made him a constitutional king, subject to his people’s will, spoken through their legal representatives in Parliament. The new King, too, had shown himself willing to extend these principles to America. In the charters which he granted or renewed, and in the instructions which he gave to the governors whom he commissioned, he did not begrudge an explicit acknowledgment of the right of the colonies to control their own taxation and the expenditures of their own colonial establishments. War embarrassed trade. It made hostile territory of the French West Indies, whence New England skippers fetched molasses for the makers of rum at home; and that was no small matter, for the shrewd New England traders were already beginning to learn how much rum would pay for, whether among the Indians of the forest country, among the savages of the African slave coast, or among their own neighbors at home, where all deemed strong drink a capital solace and defence against the asperities of a hard life. But it needed only a little circumspection, it turned out, to keep even that trade, notwithstanding the thing was a trifle difficult and hazardous. There was little cause for men who kept their wits about them to fear the law on the long, unfrequented coasts of the New World; and there was trade with the French without scruple whether war held or ceased. Buccaneers and pirates abounded in the southern seas, and legitimate traders knew as well as they did how confiscation and capture were to be avoided.