more liberty and suffered less from the interference of England than
others, it is nevertheless true that every colony was a school for a
self-governing democracy. No colonies elsewhere in the world had the same
amount of liberty. This period was a necessary preparation for the coming
republic.

We must not suppose that there was complete liberty in those days. Such a
state has not been reached even in the twentieth century. The early
government of Virginia was largely aristocratic; that of Massachusetts,
theocratic. Virginia persecuted the Puritans. The early settlers of
Massachusetts drove out Roger Williams and hanged Quakers. New York
persecuted those who did not join the Church of England. The central truth,
however, is that these thirteen colonies were making the greatest of all
world experiments in democracy and liberty.

The important colony of New Netherland (New York) was settled by the Dutch
early in the seventeenth century. They established an aristocracy with
great landed estates along the Hudson. The student of literature is
specially interested in this colony because Washington Irving (p. 112) has
invested it with a halo of romance. He shows us the sturdy Knickerbockers,
the Van Cortlands, the Van Dycks, the Van Wycks, and other chivalrous Dutch
burghers, sitting in perfect silence, puffing their pipes, and thinking of
nothing for hours together in those "days of simplicity and sunshine." For
literary reasons it is well that this was not made an English colony until
the Duke of York took possession of it in 1664.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the colonists in the middle and
northern part of the country divided their energies almost equally between
trade and agriculture. At the South, agriculture was the chief occupation
and tobacco and rice were the two leading staples. These were produced