Osgood, _American Colonies_, vol. III, pp. 4 _f._; “The English colonies, however, were not sister communities of England, but dependent local jurisdictions for whose welfare and safety the mother-country had assumed the responsibility.” Beer, _Origins_, p. 301. For discussion of the element of distance, _cf._ Lucas, _Greater Rome and Greater Britain_, pp. 32 _ff._ At the time when the New England colonies were planted, the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty, of the supreme authority in the state of that body which had hitherto been regarded rather as a judicial than a legislative one, was beginning to take hold of men's minds. It required, however, the ordeal by battle of a civil war to decide the question; and it was not until the Restoration that Parliament took its permanent place among English institutions.[740] The close connection of the colonies with the Crown arose from the fact that, during the period of their founding, their relations to the government of England were mainly with the Executive and as occupiers of the soil, the executive power being then lodged in the King in Council, and the title to the land being vested in the Crown.[741] As the constitutional situation gradually altered, the colonies remained, of course, subject to the sovereign power, wherever located, as did Englishmen at home, although so complex, and difficult of both legal and equitable settlement, were the questions of sovereignty in the Empire raised by the phenomena of overseas dominions, that it is highly questionable whether their solution has ever been found. Only a few years ago, a brilliant Englishman could speak of the bonds then uniting England and her colonies as “a confusion of legal formulas and brittle sympathies”; and although, as tested in the world-crisis of the Great War, those sympathies have proved anything but brittle, his conclusion that imperial sovereignty is, in reality, non-existent, seems irrefutable.[742] The ship of state to-day, compared to that of the seventeenth century, is as a dreadnought to the Mayflower; but if, after three centuries, the problem of imperial organization is yet awaiting solution, with the best of will on the part of both England and the dominions, there need be little surprise, and certainly no bitterness, over the slow and blundering beginnings. Unfortunately, owing to the uncertainty, in the course of England's political evolution, as to where sovereignty really lay, and also to the inherent difficulties involved in the question of the realm and the dominions, alluded to in an earlier chapter, the way was all too open for controversial misunderstandings on purely technical grounds between the colonies and the mother-country. And this quite apart from the difficulties raised by distance, and the attempted course of Stuart usurpation, against which latter, it must be remembered, the forces of freedom were to struggle in old England as well as in her colonies. Footnote 740: