THE RESTORATION ERA 37 
seventeenth century in connexion with English colon- 
isation, he was referring to political, not to commercial, 
policy ; and, speaking of his own time, he argued that 
trade with a British colony was safer than trade with a 
foreign country, because in the case of a colony the 
commercial laws were under the control of the Mother 
Country, and therefore, the Mother Country of the 
British colonies being Great Britain, the commercial 
laws of her colonies would be good laws. He did not 
note that both the effect and the avowed intent of 
the navigation laws passed in the reign of Chatles II 
was to subordinate the political system to the com- 
mercial ; nor again does he seem to have contem- 
plated a British colony so free and so self-governing as 
to take, in the matter of customs tariffs, a line directly 
opposed to the commercial policy of Great Britain. 
Yet this came to pass in Canada within four ot five 
years after his speech. The endowment of the colony 
of Rhode Island in 1663 with a liberal charter allow- 
ing the colonists to choose their own governor was, 
as a matter of fact, apparently dictated by desite to 
conciliate other provinces of New England than 
Massachusetts, Massachusetts being feared and sus- 
pected in England for its determined Puritanism. 
The reign of Charles II was extraordinarily rich 
alike in activities and in writings concerned with 
the Empire. It was a time when new colonies were 
planted and new acquisitions made ovetseas—the 
Carolinas, the Bahamas, New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsvlvania, St. Helena (already informally acquired), 
and Bombay. But still more prominently it was a time 
of oversea trade, of outstanding prosperity for the East