It was a long coast, and it took a long time to carry law and order into every bay and inlet. But every year brought increase of strength to the colonies, and with increase of strength power to rule their coasts as they chose. Queen Anne’s War over, quiet peace descended upon the colonies for almost an entire generation (1712-1740). Except for a flurry of Indian warfare now and again upon the borders, or here and there some petty plot or sudden brawl, quiet reigned, and peaceful progress. Anne, the queen, died the year after peace was signed (1714); and the next year Louis XIV. followed her, the great king who had so profoundly stirred the politics of Europe. An old generation had passed away, and new men and new measures seemed now to change the whole face of affairs. The first George took the throne, a German, not an English prince, his heart in Hannover; and presently the affairs of England fell into the hands of Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert kept his power for twenty-one years (1721-1742), and conducted the government with the shrewd, hard-headed sense and administrative capacity of a steady country squire,—as if governing were a sort of business, demanding, like other businesses, peace and an assured and equable order in affairs. It was a time of growth and recuperation, with much to do, but little to record. [Illustration: SIR ROBERT WALPOLE] The colonies, while it lasted, underwent in many things a slow transformation. Their population grew in numbers not only, but also in variety. By the end of the war there were probably close upon half a million people within their borders, counting slave with free; and with the return of peace there came a quickened increase. New England slowly lost its old ways of separate action as a self-constituted confederacy; and Massachusetts, with her new system of royal governors and a franchise broadened beyond the lines of her churches, by degrees lost her leadership. She was losing her old temper of Puritan thought. It was impossible to keep her population any longer of the single strain of which it had been made up at the first. New elements were steadily added; and new elements brought new ways of life and new beliefs. She was less and less governed by her pulpits; turned more and more to trade for sustenance; welcomed new-comers with less and less scrutiny of their ways of thinking; grew less suspicious of change, and more like her neighbors in her zest for progress.