of the plans that it might make; and although the records of its meetings are lengthy and give evidence of elaborate discussion of important matters, the results of its deliberations cannot be said to be particularly significant. The commissioners dealt with a number of local disputes of no great moment and considered certain internal difficulties that threatened to disturb the friendly intercourse among the colonies. For instance, Connecticut had levied tolls at Saybrook on vessels going up the Connecticut River to Springfield, and Massachusetts had retaliated by laying duties on goods from other colonies entering her ports. Under pressure from the commissioners both the colonies receded from their positions. Again, the commissioners recommended the granting of aid to Harvard College, and that institution consequently received from Connecticut and New Haven annually for many years a regular allowance, in return for which it presented the Connecticut colony with nearly sixty graduates in the ensuing half-century well equipped to combat latitudinarianism and heresy. The commissioners fulfilled their obligation as guardians of the purity of the Gospel, both in their support of the synod of 1646-1648 and in their strenuous efforts to check the increase of religious discontent due to the narrow definition of church membership--efforts which eventually resulted in that "illogical compromise," the Half-Way Covenant. They recommended the driving out of "Quakers, Ranters, and other Herritics of that nature," and urged that the true Gospel might be spread among the Indians. They upheld the work of the Society for the Promoting and Propagating of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England, and they directed and guided the labors of its missionaries, most notable of whom was the famous John Eliot, apostle to the Indians and translator of the Bible into their language. The most important business of the confederation concerned the defense of New England against the Indians, the Dutch, and the French. The Indians were an ever-present menace, near and far; the Dutch disputed the English claims all the way from New Amsterdam to Narragansett Bay, and resented the attempts already made to encroach upon their trading grounds; and the French at this time were strenuously denying the right of the English, particularly those of Plymouth, to establish trading-posts at Machias and on the Penobscot, and were laying claim to all the Nova Scotian territory as far west as the Penobscot.