There were many ways in which the colonies finished and filled out their lives which showed that they regarded themselves as in a sense independent communities and meant to provide for themselves everything they needed for their life alone on a separate continent. They had no thought of actually breaking away from their allegiance to the home government over sea; but no man could possibly overlook the three thousand miles of water that stretched between England and America. At that immense distance they were obliged in great measure to look out for themselves and contrive their own ways of sustenance and development, and their own way of culture. Before the French war began, two more colleges, in addition to Harvard in Massachusetts and William and Mary in Virginia, had been established to provide the higher sort of training for youths who were to enter the learned professions. Besides Yale, the College of New Jersey had been founded. At first set up in 1746 as a collegiate school, at Elizabethtown, it was in 1756 given a permanent home and built up into a notable training place for youth at Princeton. In 1754, the year Washington attacked the French in the western forests, King’s College was added to the growing list, in New York, by royal charter. Ten years later (1764), upon the very morrow of the signing of peace, certain public-spirited men of the Baptist communion followed suit in Rhode Island by founding the school which was afterwards to be called Brown University. Here were six colleges for this new English nation at the west of the Atlantic. Many wealthy colonists, particularly in the far south, continued to send their sons to the old country to take their learning from the immemorial sources at Oxford and Cambridge; but more and more the colonies provided learning for themselves. [Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN] [Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, MILK STREET, BOSTON]