George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 3, 15th edition.

[57]

An address was also sent to the king, representing

Chap XIX.}

the great cost of defending the frontiers, and requesting that the neighboring colonies might be compelled to contribute to the protection of Albany. In the necessity of common defence lay the root of the parliamentary attempt at taxation; for it created the desire of a central will, and this desire looked sometimes to the English monarch as the fountain of sovereignty, sometimes to the idea of a confederacy of the colonies, and at last to the action of parliament. In this age,

1695.

it led only to instructions. All the colonies north of Carolina were directed to furnish quotas for the defence of New York or the attacks on Canada; but the instructions, though urgently renewed, were never enforced, and were by some colonies openly disregarded.

In its relations towards Canada, New York shared the strong passion for conquest which gradually extended to all the colonies. In its internal affairs, bordering on Puritan New England, it is the most northern colony that admitted by enactment the partial establishment of the Anglican Church. The time had passed when religious sects constituted the forms under which political questions were discussed. The Presbyterians had never had dominion in New York, but had originally introduced themselves under compacts with the Dutch government. The original settlers from Holland were Calvinists, yet with a church organization far less popular than the system of New England, and having many points of sympathy with the ecclesiastical polity of Episcopacy. During the ascendency of the Dutch, the established authority of their church had often been asserted in an exclusive spirit; when the colony became English, the conquest