The frontier north of Massachusetts had thus, for the most part, come into being without any action on her part, except in the two settlements last noted. Owing to the location between the French and English, and the uncompromising geographic factors of soil and climate, the vast forested area, comprising over two thirds of all New England, increased but little in population throughout the century; and by 1700 New Hampshire had but six thousand souls, or less than that of the Bay Colony at the time that Wheelwright left it. The northern provinces, unhappily for themselves, were destined to play the part of buffer states between the French, with their savage allies, and the more safely located colonies in the south. In tracing the foundations of the latter, we find the influence of Massachusetts far more potent, for they were being laid mainly by men who found scant room in that increasingly reactionary commonwealth. The founders of Rhode Island and Connecticut alike condemned the religious and political policy that the Bay Colony had now definitely made its own; and the more democratic and tolerant forms of government, which developed in the two former, “represented more nearly the principles which underlie the government of the United States to-day than any other of the British colonies.”[445] The seeds of both political and religious liberty had been brought to America by the Massachusetts colonists; but the leaders, partly from a dread of losing their own influence, and partly from a genuine fear of noxious weeds, had done their best to interfere with their growth. The founders of Rhode Island and Connecticut, with less desire for personal power, and greater courage as to tares in the wheat, watered and nursed the seeds of liberty, which bore an abundant harvest. In Rhode Island, indeed, the weeds flourished riotously; but the faith of the founders was justified in both colonies, and their commonwealths marched with Holland at the head of those struggling for human freedom, while England and Massachusetts yet lagged and nagged. Footnote 445: C. M. Andrews, _The Colonial Period_ (New York, 1912), p. 28.