RETROSPECT.--ENCROACHMENTS OF ENGLAND.--RESISTANCE TO THE REVENUE LAWS.--STAMP ACT.--SECOND CONGRESS OF COLONIES MET IN NEW YORK.--EDUCATIONAL INTEREST. Thus far we have traced the progress of Rhode Island, step by step from the first small settlement on the banks of the Mooshausick to the flourishing Colony, which, by its firmness and perseverance had made it mistress of the shores and islands of Narragansett Bay. We have seen it taking for its corner stone a vital principle of human society, unrecognized as yet by the most advanced civilization. We have seen this principle and society with it constantly endangered by misinterpretations, and the little Colony brought more than once to the brink of the precipice by the malignity of implacable enemies. We have seen it gradually growing in strength and enlightenment, drawing abundant harvests from a niggard soil, spreading its ships of commerce over distant seas and protecting its coasts by its own ships of war. We have seen it working out its civil organization by patient experiment, making laws and unmaking them as they met or failed to meet the want for which they were made. And now we shall see her strong by virtue, resolute by conviction and rich by intelligent industry, gird herself up for the contest which was to decide forever the relations of the British colonies of North America to their mother country. But before we enter upon this part of our subject let us pause a moment and consider somewhat more closely our new starting point. The society which Roger Williams brought with him to the banks of the Mooshausick was a morally constituted society, in which all the questions of moral law had been studied and discussed as revealed in the Scriptures. It was not till their numbers increased and their wants with them that the idea of law took root amongst them and they became a legally constituted society. Their laws arose from their necessities and followed the development of their legal sense. They felt the want and strove by experiment to discover the remedy. Successful experiment became law and the statute book the record of the progress of civilization. To this statute book, therefore, we must go for our knowledge of colonial life in all its relations. It defines the condition of the individual and the qualifications, the rights and the duties of the citizen. It defines the powers and prerogatives of government, and assigns to each department its limits and its sphere. Its enumeration of crime is the key to the moral sense of the community, and its provisions for the moral and intellectual training of the citizen show how far it has comprehended the reciprocal obligations and true nature of the ties which bind the citizen to his commonwealth.