Following this guide we find that Rhode Island has worked out her problem of self-government and soul liberty, framing for herself a pure democracy and surrounding it with all the provisions required for protection against foreign violence and internal dissension. After many trials she has organized a judiciary system adequate to the protection of person and property and the prompt administration of justice. She has cultivated the sense of right and wrong and made careful provision for the enforcement of contracts and the punishment of crimes. She has opened highways, established ferries and built bridges. She has favored navigation by the institution of judicious harbor laws. She has provided for the extermination of wolves and foxes by the offer of liberal bounties, and for the protection of fish and deer by stringent laws. She has broached the difficult subject of public charities and made a beginning of provision for the poor and the insane. She has initiated a system of public schools and founded a college which in the course of half a century becomes a university. She has opened her doors wide for different creeds, and required only that they all should be equally free. Her relations with the mother country had taken their coloring from the attitude of self-defence which she was compelled to maintain towards the adjacent colonies of Massachusetts and Connecticut, which were eager to divide her territory between them. Against their long persecutions her last appeal was to the King, and she made it without humbling herself, for her enemy was at her own door and of her own household. From the beginning of her civil life she had been contemptuously refused admission to the league from which Massachusetts and Connecticut derived the strength that made them bold both for aggression and for defence. More than once she seemed to be upon the point of being crushed, but of yielding--never. Hence in her relations with the mother country she never assumed the defiant attitude which her stronger sisters assumed and which at an early day awakened suspicions of their loyalty. Rhode Island was loyal as it behooved her to be; but she never carried her loyalty so far as to imperil the rights guaranteed to her by her charter.