wanting, for the Stuart kings, Charles II and James H, were not
less despotic in spirit than Louis XIV. But while in France there
was a vast organism which moved only as the King willed, in
England power was more widely distributed. It may be claimed with
truth that English national liberties are a growth from the local
freedom which has existed from time immemorial. When British
colonists left the motherland to found a new society, their first
instinct was to create institutions which involved local control.
The solemn covenant by which in 1620 the worn company of the
Mayflower, after a long and painful voyage, pledged themselves to
create a self-governing society, was the inevitable expression of
the English political spirit. Do what it would, London could
never control Boston as Versailles controlled Quebec.

The English colonist kept his eyes fixed on his own fortunes.
>From the state he expected little; from himself, everything. He
had no great sense of unity with neighboring colonists under the
same crown. Only when he realized some peril to his interests,
some menace which would master him if he did not fight, was he
stirred to warlike energy. French leaders, on the other hand,
were thinking of world politics. The voyage of Verrazano, the
Italian sailor who had been sent out by Francis I of France in
1524, and who had sailed along a great stretch of the Atlantic
coast, was deemed by Frenchmen a sufficient title to the whole of
North America. They flouted England's claim based upon the
voyages of the Cabots nearly thirty years earlier. Spain, indeed,
might claim Florida, but the English had no real right to any
footing in the New World. As late as in 1720, when the fortunes
of France were already on the wane in the New World, Father Bobe,
a priest of the Congregation of Missions, presented to the French