And he proceeded to do it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant's mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor"--the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and silver-banded wooden leg, he ruled the colony for twenty years with a rod of iron, fortifying it, enlarging it, settling its boundaries, keeping the Indians over-awed, the veriest dictator this continent ever saw, until, one August day in 1664, an English fleet sailed up the bay and summoned the city to surrender. Stuyvesant set his men to work repairing the fortifications, and was for holding out, but the town was really defenseless against the frigates, which had only to sail up the river and bombard it from either side; his people were disaffected and to some extent not sorry to be delivered from his rule; the terms offered by the English were favorable, and though Stuyvesant swore he never would surrender, a white flag was finally run up over the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam. The city was at once renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside the city limits. This conquest, bloodless and easy as it was, was fraught with momentous consequences. It brought New England into closer relations with Maryland and Virginia by creating a link between them, binding them together; it gave England command of the spot designed by nature to be the commercial and military centre of the Atlantic sea-board, and confirmed a possession of it that was never thereafter seriously disturbed, until the colonies themselves disputed it. Had New Amsterdam remained Dutch, dividing, as it did, New England from the South, there would never have been any question of revolution or independence. The flash of that little white flag on that September day, decided the fate of the continent. * * * * * The Duke of York, being of a generous disposition and having many claims upon him, used a portion of the great territory granted him in America to reward his friends, and thereby laid the foundation for another great commonwealth with a unique history. New Jersey was given jointly to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley, and in 1673, Lord Berkeley sold his share, illy-defined as the "southwestern part," to a Quaker named Edward Byllinge. Byllinge soon became insolvent, and his property was taken over by William Penn and two others, as trustees, and the seeds sown for one of the most interesting experiments in history.