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 II Sources And Character Of The Population Of The Jerseys While it is impossible in a brief study of this character to give any lengthy description of the original settlement of the Jerseys, certain facts concerning their colonial population which had great effect upon the development of their institutions must be pointed out. The Dutch efforts to colonize in the territory which later became New Jersey were certainly a failure, owing partly to the hostility of the Indians. As a result of their attempts there remained at the time of the English conquest only the small though compact settlement at Bergen and a few scattered boweries along the Hudson.1 The Dutch element thus established in the population of the province persisted, however, and was reinforced during the English rule by the further removal to New Jersey of Dutch settlers from New York.2 In what later became Bergen County the Dutch continued to predominate. They made themselves felt in the politics of the colony, nevertheless, mainly by their inactivity, for they evidently shared in only a small degree the thoughts and feelings which actuated the rest of the population. The real development of East Jersey was due to the great wave of immigration which came from New England,chiefly by way of Long Island, as soon as English authority was established. The greater part of the New England settlers were from the old jurisdiction of New Haven l and thus represented one of the most extreme types of New England training and thought. To them proprietary institutions with their semi-feudal incidents were not only unfamiliar but repugnant. The immigrants settled in "towns" in true New England style and conducted their public business by town meeting. As a preliminary step to founding their new towns they boun...