away, appeal to her was difficult and costly, and the English brethren were not always as sympathetic as they might have been with the aims and methods of their co-religionists. This very isolation from the mother country, at a time when the New Englanders were pushing their fur-trading activities into the regions claimed by the Dutch and the French, rendered some sort of united action necessary and desirable. The settlers were of one stock and one purpose. Despite bickerings and disputes, they shared a common desire to enjoy the liberties of the Christian religion and to obtain from the new country into which they had come both subsistence and profit. The determination to open up trading posts on the Penobscot, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and to utilize all waters for their fisheries brought them into conflict with their rivals, at New Amsterdam and in Nova Scotia, and made it imperative, should any one colony--Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or New Haven--attempt to pursue its plans alone, for all to band together in its support. The troubles already encountered with the Dutch on the Delaware and the Connecticut and with the French in Maine, in the competition for the fur trade of the interior, had rendered the situation acute and led, very early, to the proposal that a combination be effected. But it was not until 1643 that anything was accomplished. In May of that year, at the suggestion of Connecticut and New Haven, commissioners from these colonies, and from Massachusetts and Plymouth also, met at Boston and drafted a body of articles for a consociation or confederation to be known as the United Colonies of New England, a form of union which found a precedent in the federation of the Netherlands and corresponded in the political field to the consociation of churches in the ecclesiastical. Maine was not asked because, as a province belonging to Gorges, the people there (to quote from Winthrop's _Journal_) "ran a different course from the other colonies, both in their ministry and civil administration, ... had lately made Acomenticus (a poor village) a corporation, and had made a taylor their mayor, and had entertained one Hull, an excommunicated person and very contentious, for their minister." Rhode Island, as a seat of separatism and heresy, was not invited and perhaps not even considered. For managing the affairs of the confederation, the main objects of which were friendship and amity, protection and defense, advice and succor, and the preservation of the truth and purity of the Gospel, eight commissioners were provided, to be chosen by the assemblies of the colonies and to represent the colonies as independent political units. Meetings were to be held once a year in one or other of the leading towns and a full record was to be kept of the business done. The board thus established never did more than make recommendations and offer advice, as it had no authority to execute any