The strong hereditary instincts of Germanic freedom were best represented in the seventeenth century by the Hollanders, who in the little republic had long lived under democratic institutions. Nearly all the leading men who settled New England had come to America after a longer or shorter stay in Holland, where they imbibed the republican ideas which they transported as good seed to America. The Pilgrims, who were the first settlers of Massachusetts; many of the Puritans who came later to Boston and Salem; the leaders of the Connecticut Colony,—Hooker, Davenport, and many of their company,—had all been in Holland. The military commanders—Miles Standish, John Smith, Samuel Argall, Lyon Gardiner, Governor Dudley, and others—had been trained in the Dutch armies. Thus it came to pass that while the makers of New England were English in blood and language, their peculiar institutions were not of England, but directly borrowed from the one republic of Northern Europe. The Middle States were all settled under the Netherlands influences. Even in New York, where through the patroon system semi-feudal institutions very much like those of aristocratic England had begun, the innate love of liberty in the people ultimately broke through these as a seed through its shell. The full growth was the typical American State of New York, whose constitution possessed more of the features of the National Constitution of 1787 than any other of the original thirteen States. Feudalism and its ideas were thus for the most part left behind or soon outgrown. The Church, even when united with the State, as was the case in some of the colonies, was of democratic form. The system of landholding and registry, the town-meeting, and the written and secret ballot,—all Germanic ideas,—with many customs and practical political ideas brought from Holland, made the people free, developed the individual man, and gave the colonies a reserve of strength and endurance impossible in Canada. In their plan of strategy, the French idea was to limit the English domain within and east of the Alleghany Mountains by a chain of forts stretching from Quebec along the Great Lakes, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. This was a scheme of magnificent distances, involving enormous energy and expense, especially while the English held the seacoast and bases of supplies. It was evident that for any hope of success in their mighty territorial scheme the aborigines must be secured as allies. In this work the priest could do more than the soldier. Hence the zeal and energy of the spiritual orders were invoked, and put under tribute to the grand design of Gallicizing America.