The first and second chapters of this work treated of the settlement of Massachusetts and the framing and establishing of that social system and form of government which through successive generations, the settlers and their descendants took part, which culminated in the Revolution. The founders of Massachusetts and of all New England, were almost entirely Englishmen. Their emigration to New England began in 1620, it was inconsiderable till 1630, at the end of ten years more it almost ceased. A people consisting at that time of not many more than twenty thousand persons, thenceforward multiplied on its own soil, in remarkable seclusion from other communities, for nearly two centuries. Such exceptions to this statement are of small account. In 1651 after the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell sent some four or five hundred of his Scotch prisoners to Boston, but very little trace of this accession is left. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, about one hundred and fifty families of French Huguenots came to Massachusetts; their names and a considerable number of their posterity are yet to be found. A hundred and twenty Scotch-Irish families, came over in 1719 and settled in Boston, and New Hampshire. Some slight emigrations from it took place at an early date, but they soon discontinued, and it was not till after the Revolution that those swarms began to depart, which have since occupied so large a portion of the territory of the United States. During that long period their identity was unimpaired. No race has ever been more homogeneous than this, at the outbreak of the Revolution, and for many years later. Thus the people of New England was a singularly unmixed race. There was probably not a county in England occupied by a population of purer English blood than theirs. Down to the eve of the war in 1775, New England had little knowledge of the communities which took part in that conflict with her. Till the time of the Boston Port Bill, Massachusetts and Virginia, the two principal English settlements, had with each other scarcely more relations of acquaintance, business, mutual influence, or common action, than either of them had with Bermuda or Barbados.