While the New England colonies were rapidly increasing in population and prosperity, the New Netherlands was not. In 1647 the population of the New Netherlands was only about 1,000 or 2,000 less than in 1643. A new policy was ordered by the Lords States General so liberal that settlers could buy as few acres as they wished to and enjoy civil and religious freedom as did the English colonies north and south of them. Under the Patroon régime the Dutch colonists had less freedom, the enjoyment of fewer rights, and greater hardships to endure than in Holland. They were, as they saw things, imposed upon and serving masters who regarded them as slaves. The gulf between the classes and the masses seemed to widen and deepen—on one side, lords and masters, and on the other side, subjects and serfs. The Patroon family of the Van Rensselaers by marriage and intermarriage were related to the Van Cortlands, Schuylers, Livingstons, and other wealthy families, not only in New Netherlands but also in Virginia, and although they had not castles, as the barons along the Rhine, they had spacious mansions on their country estates where they spent their summers and in the winters went to Manhattan Island and in their places there gave royal entertainments to the élite. They had a retinue of black servants (slaves) in livery to attend them. The transplanting of the feudal system, even though somewhat modified, to the western world, where the very spirit of freedom, liberty, and equality prevailed, was doomed to failure and disaster. The principal cause was in the system itself, though the Van Rensselaer Patroons’ course hastened its abrogation, terminating in blood. The most of the Van Rensselaer Patroons were liberal, lenient, and indulgent, permitting the rents to remain unpaid until they amounted to a sum equal to, or in some cases exceeding, the value of the leased land. It needed not the wisdom of a prophet to predict trouble from this course. When primogeniture was abolished the eldest son was no longer the inheritor of the estate, but all the children shared in it. Stephen (3d) Van Rensselaer, the seventh Patroon, born in 1764 and died in 1839, was in fact the last of the Van Rensselaer Patroons. He was graduated in Harvard in 1782, a doctor of laws, the recipient of many and distinguished civil and military honors, and a devoted patriot, called “the good old Patroon,” as soon as the law of primogeniture was abolished sought to dispose of the most of the Rensselaerwyck estate (which had been somewhat lessened by grants and sales) under a peculiar form of deed or conveyance to actual tillers of the soil. This title deed was called by some “a lease in fee” and by others “a sale in fee,” reserving to himself in the conveyances and to his heirs and assigns all mines and minerals and all streams of water for mill purposes; and then certain old-time feudal returns, denominated rents payable annually at