Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. POLITICAL SEPAEATENE8S OF THE BRITISH COLONIES. Causes of segregation — Lack of the sentiment of union — What was a British colony ? — Political nature of a colony, and the relations of a colonist to the crown and to his colony — Political corporations — Allegiance — Social and economical effects of separate- ness ; its advantages and disadvantages — Extremities to which spirit of exclusion reached — Colonial individuality — Colonial development due to self-government: colonies were creatures of growth and development — Separateness due to natural causes. Political separateness is the most striking characteristic that greets the observer. Though the colonies are contiguous, and, in New England, homogeneous, they are disunited: they have no common constitution. This condition of segregation is attributable to several causes: 1. They were planted at different times, from different motives, with different objects, under different circumstances, and by settlers of different characteristics. 2. Diverse topographical and climatic conditions were unfavorable to consolidation, or to anything like oneness among them all. 3. Race instinct, as well as reasons of convenience and prudence, imposed limitations upon aggregations which might become unwieldy, which might jeopardize the enjoyment of self-government, or compel too great a sacrifice of individual freedom to the exactions of the community. To establish the verity of this proposition, it needs the mention only of the hundred, the parish, the township, theshire, and the county, as illustrating natural race precincts. Were anything wanting to exemplify other motives for segregation, the migrations from Massachusetts to Connecticut and from the Carolinas to Tennessee would fully set forth the fact that sense of restr...