Although the Puritans of Massachusetts had fled England to gain “religious freedom,” they might better have said to gain freedom for their own sort of religion, for they were as intolerant of other religious beliefs as had been the Church of England of theirs. Indeed, Connecticut and Rhode Island were split off from the Massachusetts colony because of religious disputes. The southern colonies, still clinging to the state church of the mother country, were anathema to New England and New England to them. With the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland—and all zealous for their own religious contentions—the tendency was even further from, rather than toward, the building of a common nation. And so, with diverse nationalities, religious and economic and moral distinctions; with widely varying charters from the king and jealousies between rival groups of European “owners,” we may well wonder that the colonies got along together at all. For a century and a half the population increased, and with it the discordant feeling between at least many of the colonies. They had only one thing in common—an increasing distrust of and rebellious spirit toward the mother country and the king. This could result in the joining of forces against a common and more powerful enemy. And so it did finally. But in all this there had been no proposal for a new nation, or, more particularly, for a new theory and plan of government. True enough, there had been a convention called at Albany in 1754 for united effort against the Indians, but the colonies were not strongly in favor of it, and the king would not tolerate the union. As lands along the coast became more occupied and therefore higher priced, and the political uncertainties more acute, the more adventurous colonists, perhaps irked by the restraint of individual freedom which any government imposes, struck out for the wilderness westward. [Illustration: MARQUETTE _Drawn by Howard Petrey, Superior, Wisconsin_] Also, because we are trying here to study what was in the minds of men, _why_ they did this or that, it must be remembered that the world was still looking for the Northwest Passage to Cathay. As late as the outbreak of the Revolution, and even later, England was subsidizing efforts to locate this short route to the fabled East. Thus the same urge which had led Columbus to the discovery of America played a part in the development of colonial plans.