Historia, filosofía-biografia-pensamiento

1662. These territorial assumptions on the part of Massachusetts much increased the king's hostility. This probably would not have proved fatal had it not been re-enforced by the determination of the merchants and manufacturers of the mother-country to crush what they feared was becoming a rival power beyond seas. They insisted upon full enforcement of the Navigation Laws, which made America's foreign trade in a cruel degree subservient to English interest. So incorrigible was the colony, it was found that this end could be compassed only by the abrogation of the charter, so that English law might become immediately valid in Massachusetts, colonial laws to the contrary notwithstanding. Accordingly, in 1684, the charter was vacated and the colonists ceased to be free, their old government with its popular representation giving way to an arbitrary commission. The other New England colonies--Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven--had made haste to proclaim Charle...

l638. For nearly forty years the New England colonies were not again molested, the merciless vigor with which they had fought making a lasting impression upon their blood-thirsty foes. The cruel slavery to which the surviving natives were subjected, the English justified by the example of the Jews in their treatment of the Canaanites. 1642. The Narraganset chief, Miantonomoh, had become the friend and ally of the English by a treaty ratified in 1636, mainly through the good offices of Roger Williams, In 1638, after the destruction of the Pequots, there was a new treaty, embracing Uncas with his bold Mohegans, and stipulating that any quarrel between Miantonomoh and Uncas should be referred to the English. In 1642 Miantonomoh was accused of plotting against the English, and summoned before the General Court at Boston. Though acquitted he vowed revenge upon Uncas as the instigator of the charge. His friendship for Roger Williams, as also for Samuel Gorton, the purchaser of Shawomet...

Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy, and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: "The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced upon their vict...