Meanwhile the Assembly was very active. A party change took place at the election of 1677--Governor Arnold was chosen in place of Governor Clarke. This was equivalent to a triumph of the war party. The militia law was again revised, care still being taken to protect the rights of conscience. How jealously these were guarded appears also in the unwillingness to multiply oaths of office. Five years before an act had been passed requiring deputies to take an engagement on entering upon the duties of their office. This law met with great opposition at its original passage, and its repeal was hailed with general satisfaction. Every freeman, it was said, made an engagement of allegiance on receiving the rights of citizenship. An oath is too solemn a thing to be lightly taken--why should we use it? So reasoned those conscientious men. By another act, also, they showed how fast they held to this fundamental principle. Another sect, the Sabbatarians or Seventh-Day Baptists, had taken root and begun to flourish in the free air of Rhode Island. In 1667 they were sufficiently numerous to justify them in asking that market day might be changed from Saturday, their Sabbath, to some other day. Without breaking in upon an old custom by changing the day, the Assembly added Thursday as another market day and thus quieted the scruples of honest and useful citizens. We have seen how promptly and firmly the Assembly met the encroachments of Connecticut. Their remonstrances were followed up by spirited and judicious action. The surest way to strengthen their hold upon the disputed territory was by peopling it. Among the coves and inlets which give such quiet beauty to Narragansett Bay there is none more beautiful than that broad sheet of navigable water which still retains in part its original name of Coweset. Here it was resolved to plant a colony and build a town. Five hundred acres were set apart in lots on the bay for house lots--four thousand five hundred in farms of ninety acres, which were distributed among fifty men on condition of building within a year and opening roads from the bay into the country. To guard against rash speculation no colonist was to sell his land within twenty-one years unless with the consent of the Assembly. Thus on the verdant hill-side at whose foot a ripple from the Atlantic mingles with the inland murmur of Mascachugh was built the pleasant hamlet of East Greenwich.