time involve them in inconveniences with their Dutch neighbours; but their dissensions were chiefly with each other, or domestically within each colony.  The harsh proceedings in Massachusetts and elsewhere against Baptists and other Sectaries gave some colour to Roger Williams’s assertion that, in the matter of religious toleration, New England was becoming old while Old England was becoming new; and, as soon as Quakerism had broken out in New England and Quakers had appeared there (1656), it became evident that there would be even less mercy for that sect in New England than on the other side of the Atlantic.  Nevertheless, with their zealous Puritanism, their energy and industry, and the abilities of their Bradfords, Bradstreets, Winslows, Winthrops, Standishes, Endicotts, Hayneses, Hopkinses, Newmans, Williamses, and other prominent governors or assistant-governors, the Confederacy and the Plantations went on prosperously towards their ultimate, though yet unforeseen, destiny in the formation of the United States.  Cromwell, indeed, had a scheme which would have stopped that issue.  He had a scheme for fetching all the Puritans of New England back and planting them splendidly in Ireland.  Communications on the subject had passed as early as 1651, when Ireland had been just reconquered; but naturally without effect.  The New Englanders were not then too numerous perhaps to have been transported to Ireland bodily; but, as one of their historians says, “they had taken root.”  Their increase, however, for more than a century thenceforward was to be mainly within themselves, for new arrivals from England had become scarce.[1] II.  OTHER COLONIES AND SETTLEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA.  These too went on very much at their own will, though not quite unnoticed. Virginia, dating from 1608, and Maryland, dating from 1634, continued to be the favourite colonies for Royalist settlers, Anglican or Roman Catholic; but there had been recent additions of English Puritans, and of transported Scottish prisoners of war, to the population of Virginia, and the connexions with the mother-country had remained unbroken.  There were commercial regulations about both Colonies by the English Council, and grants of passes to them.  Canada and the other regions about the St. Lawrence, the possession of which had been contested by the English and the French in the reign of Charles I, had lapsed long ago into the hands of the French; but Major Sedgwick had wrested back for Cromwell, in 1654, the peninsula then called Acadie, but now Nova Scotia, being part of the territory that had been granted under that name by Charles to his Scottish Secretary, the Earl of Stirling, and had been colonised by Scots, to some extent, from 1625 onwards.  Off the mainland, Newfoundland, which had contained an English fishing population for at least twenty years, was not neglected; and, beyond the bounds of any of the North-American Colonies or Plantations that were definitely named and recognised, there may have