It was to be waged for the most part by a new generation. The great men of the foundation were passing away. John Clarke, who had thrown the mild lustre of his purity over the first half of the life of the Colony, died in 1676, leaving a deep longing, or rather a sore need of his civil virtues and diplomatic skill. Samuel Gorton, whose tenacious convictions made him stern and intolerant in public life though gentle and attractive in private intercourse, and whose vigorous and subtle intellect led him to rejoice in the bitterness of controversy as the swift horse rejoices in the dust of the race-course, died the year after. Roger Williams was spared a few years longer--bold, ardent, disputatious, resolute, sincere and earnest to the last. But the young of his middle age were growing old, and the companions of his active years were falling around him. His colony had thriven and flourished. The five men who followed him from Salem had become "a thousand or twelve hundred men able to bear arms." In spite of the threatening of the political horizon his strong faith told him that the being in whom he had put his trust thus far would stand by him still. And thus he laid his head upon his last pillow, a satisfied and happy man. Another man of bold, original type--William Harris--had run his active career, and died with his hands and heart still full of unfinished work. We have seen to what length he carried his doctrine of individual right to free action. We have seen him wage a bitter controversy with Roger Williams. Time after time he crossed the Atlantic as agent of the great boundary questions which fill so large a space in the Rhode Island history of this period; the last time, and from which he was never to return, as agent for Connecticut. A deep presentiment of disaster seems to have filled his mind as he was preparing himself for this voyage, and not satisfied with making his will he presented it for probate with his own hands. The presentiment was well founded. On the outward passage he was taken by a Barbary corsair and sold into slavery. By the exertion of friends he was ransomed after a year's captivity and made his way through Spain and France to England. But the year of slavery had told hard upon him, and three days after his arrival he died. It has been remarked by a profound thinker that while Williams's more comprehensive mind could embrace both the practical and ideal in their mutual relations, the moment that Harris touched the ideal he became a radical. It does not seem to have struck his cotemporaries as it does us to see him accepting the agency of Connecticut in her controversy with Rhode Island. But he has a definite place in Rhode Island history and did her good service through his long and somewhat turbulent career.