that the Massachusetts authorities, having been offered by their neighbors a chance to share in a profitable opportunity, deliberately tried, by fraud and force, not only to obtain all the profits for themselves, but to prevent the very people whose enterprise it was from retaining any share in it. Not possessing the interpretative advantages of a New England ancestry, one is, perhaps, limited to remarking that the business dealings of ultra-religious people are often peculiar. Footnote 453: Bradford, _Plymouth_, pp. 222, 233, 311. Footnote 454: In 1631. J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. I, p. 62. Footnote 455: Bradford, _Plymouth_, pp. 312 _f._; J. Winthrop (_History_, vol. I, p. 125) gives as reasons for refusal that the place was not fit for habitation on account of the Indians, the bar across the river, and the closing of navigation in winter. Even his admiring editor, Savage, was “constrained to remark” that these “look to me more like pretexts, than real motives,” and that the Pilgrims' subsequent complaints of their treatment by Massachusetts “appear very natural, if not unanswerable” (p. 125 _n._). Footnote 456: J. Winthrop, _History_, vol. I, p. 132. Doyle (_Puritan Colonies_, vol. I, p. 151), by a slip, wrongly dates the negotiations in 1634, making it appear that they followed the Massachusetts expeditions instead of preceding them. The Dutch, meanwhile, seem to have repented of their former hospitality, probably because of the warnings that the English had early sent them of their encroachment upon English territory, and of the rapid growth of the eastern colonies, which might threaten even their occupation of the Hudson.[457] Hearing of the projected settlement by Plymouth, a party was sent from New Amsterdam in January to buy land from the Indians,[458] and some of the Dutch were already ensconced in a little fort, on the present site of Hartford, when the English arrived in the late summer. In spite of Dutch protests, however, the Pilgrims, in their “great new barke,” sailed past the fort, and, passing north of the bounds of the Hollanders' Indian purchase, settled at what is now Windsor, buying the soil from its savage occupants. A later attempt by the Dutch to dislodge them by threatened violence proved unavailing.[459] Footnote 457: Bradford, _Letter-book_, pp. 51 _ff._ The Dutch territorial claims were noted (_supra_, Chap. III). The English grant of this territory preceded Dutch discovery by three years, but the question was one of time between discovery and settlement, and of extension of territory from points discovered. There was no established international law by which this particular dispute could be settled. Individual opinion may differ as to the ethics of the case. To me, with no desire to make out a case either way, the legal points seem to be impossible of dogmatic answer. Footnote 458: