[984]. Ibid., p. 296.
[985]. Massachusetts Records, vol. V, pp. 390 f.
[986]. Randolph Papers, vol. III, pp. 242, 246 f.
[987]. Ibid., pp. 271 ff.
[988]. Hutchinson, History, vol. I, p. 306. Doyle (Puritan Colonies, vol. II, p. 222) makes a slip in this connection. He states that only one freeman in ten cast his vote. As a matter of fact there were not over 1500 freemen (McKinley, Suffrage, pp. 334 f.), so that the 1321 votes cast would seem to indicate great interest in the election, instead of the lack of it which Doyle suggests.
[989]. For the legal proceedings, vide Winsor, Memorial History, vol. I, pp. 378 f.
[990]. The report of a meeting in Boston, from which non-freemen were excluded, a vote being then taken after an exhortation from Mather, cannot be considered as evidence of the sentiment of the community at large. The very fact that the non-freemen were not allowed to be present is in itself significant.
CHAPTER XVI
AN EXPERIMENT IN ADMINISTRATION
In the preceding chapters, we have tried to show the comprehensive nature of that expansion of Europe which, with ever-accelerating swiftness, has been in operation since the age of discovery, and to indicate that, however great an importance any single colony, English or other, might attribute to itself, its contemporary significance could be measured relatively only to the interests of that empire of which it formed a part. For more or less obvious reasons, this great movement of expansion has usually been treated from the geographical standpoint. We think, for example, of England acquiring a foothold in the Far East or a post in Africa, the island of Jamaica or that section of America known as Virginia, rather than of her adding to her empire spices, slaves, sugar, or tobacco. Columbus, however, did not sail in search of a new land, but only of a new way to a market; and throughout the whole of the earlier expansion of Europe, we shall miss much of its significance, fail to understand its motives and methods, and misjudge its political ethics and standards, if we allow ourselves to fall into the way of thinking in geographical units, with their localized governments, instead of imperially and in terms of commodities and trade.
In the struggle of nations, not for land, but for materials and markets, on a world-scale, it has been necessary that each contending empire should be as economically self-contained, as closely united politically, and as militarily formidable as possible. Toward the close of the seventeenth century, the conditions of successful competition were beginning to stand out in somewhat clearer relief, as a result of the blind gropings and fortuitous groupings of a century of experiment, in a world whose economic possibilities had been but little known. In view of these requirements, and of the way in which the local New England policy ran counter to them, there is no need to invoke any malignant spirit, or even any very deeply selfish aim, on the part of the later Stuarts, to account for their attempt to unify and consolidate the Empire. Their policy may have been shaped only gradually in their own minds, and, in any case, could assume tangible form only by overcoming the obstacles of existing conditions and institutions, and by the use of such instruments as the times, fate, and their own natures allowed to them. The remainder of this volume will be occupied with the efforts of themselves and their successors to bring back the New England colonies into the general life of the Empire, and to establish those political relations which were to subsist for another century.