third Virginia charter, the House tried to interfere but was warned off—because the business concerned only the king and his advisers. {3169} Moreover there was no lack of precedents for the extension not only of common law but of royal ordinances and statute law outside of the original realm of England. … Such in outline was the status of English colonial law previous to 1688. It was in the process of formation and adaptation to the new empire. There were ample precedents for the exercise of the rights of British sovereignty in America, but those rights had not yet been called into the fullest operation. Their legitimacy however was in general fully acknowledged by the colonists. They had been allowed great liberty in establishing their governments, erecting courts, levying taxes, organizing and calling out their militia for defence against the Indians. Colonial society had been allowed to develop freely in all lines and the product was far different from anything which existed in the mother country. It was democratic rather than aristocratic; it was also extremely particularistic, and too remote from England to feel much interest in the general concerns of the empire. In this divergence of social organization and interests, as between the colonies and the mother country, lay the germ which might develop into resistance on the part of the plantations, if at any time England should attempt to enforce her rightful supremacy over them. But as yet there was too little of the spirit of union among the colonists to make possible any combined action. Also those dynasties whose government had been most arbitrary in England, the Tudors and Stuarts, had, till the reign of James II, treated the colonies with great leniency. But the statements just made do not cover the whole ground. They describe the attitude of the colonies in general toward the mother country, but they do not describe the special conditions which prevailed in New England. If we wish to know how the theory of colonial independence originated, we must look in that direction. The American revolution cannot be explained without reference to the political character and tendencies of Puritanism. … Puritanism then was a political as well as a religious movement. On the one hand its doctrines contained a strong democratic leaven; on the other they contained principles which might lead to the separation of church and state. How the former tendency worked itself out in New England is familiar; how the latter failed of accomplishment there is equally well known. The Puritans of Massachusetts were not opposed to the union of church and state or to the employment of the secular power to enforce religious conformity. … What they were opposed to was every other form of state church except their own. … In order to