Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ...purposes of a charter. The very freedom of its provisions, which in later days would give it strength, was in those primitive times a source of weakness. It was more a patent for the towns than for the people, legalizing, in effect, so many independent corporations, rather than constructing one sovereign power resting upon the popular will. It produced a confederacy, and not a union. Its defects are seen in the facility with which Coddington, contrary to the wishes of the people at Aquedneck, severed that island from the rest of the colony, and usurped a power almost dictatorial. Under its operation, in every town and hamlet were spread the seeds of discontent and disunion, and nothing but the pressure from without, and the supreme law of self-preservation, kept the discordant settlements from utter destruction, and from being absorbed by the adjoining governments. Its reception had been hailed with extravagant joy by a despised and persecuted people. Its expiration was attended with no regret, for twenty years had wrought that change in the feeble colony which the same period works from infancy to manhood. As a basis of civil polity it had " outlived its usefulness," and was suffered to depart without a murmur. Thus closed the second epoch of Rhode Island history. The first presents a view of scattered cabins reared in the primeval wilderness, till they become a little village on the Chap, river bank. One after another these feeble hamlets strug-W-y gle into life, remote from each other, amid virgin forests 1668. and on the ocean shore. The hardy settlers, twice exiled for opinion's sake, have become the pioneers of principles immortal as truth itself. What, though wild beasts disturb their rest at night, and the Indian warwhoop rings...
