governor and company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England.”  In this case the law did but incorporate a group drawn together by religious ties.  “We must be knit together as one man,” wrote John Winthrop, the first Puritan governor in America.  Far to the south, on the banks of the Delaware River, a Swedish commercial company in 1638 made the beginnings of a settlement, christened New Sweden; it was destined to pass under the rule of the Dutch, and finally under the rule of William Penn as the proprietary colony of Delaware.

In a certain sense, Georgia may be included among the “company colonies.”  It was, however, originally conceived by the moving spirit, James Oglethorpe, as an asylum for poor men, especially those imprisoned for debt.  To realize this humane purpose, he secured from King George II, in 1732, a royal charter uniting several gentlemen, including himself, into “one body politic and corporate,” known as the “Trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America.”  In the structure of their organization and their methods of government, the trustees did not differ materially from the regular companies created for trade and colonization.  Though their purposes were benevolent, their transactions had to be under the forms of law and according to the rules of business.

=The Religious Congregation.=—­A second agency which figured largely in the settlement of America was the religious brotherhood, or congregation, of men and women brought together in the bonds of a common religious faith.  By one of the strange fortunes of history, this institution, founded in the early days of Christianity, proved to be a potent force in the origin and growth of self-government in a land far away from Galilee.  “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul,” we are told in the Acts describing the Church at Jerusalem.  “We are knit together as a body in a most sacred covenant of the Lord ... by virtue of which we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole,” wrote John Robinson, a leader among the Pilgrims who founded their tiny colony of Plymouth in 1620.  The Mayflower Compact, so famous in American history, was but a written and signed agreement, incorporating the spirit of obedience to the common good, which served as a guide to self-government until Plymouth was annexed to Massachusetts in 1691.

[Illustration:  THE ORIGINAL GRANTS]

Three other colonies, all of which retained their identity until the eve of the American Revolution, likewise sprang directly from the congregations of the faithful:  Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, mainly offshoots from Massachusetts.  They were founded by small bodies of men and women, “united in solemn covenants with the Lord,” who planted their settlements in the wilderness.  Not until many a year after Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson conducted their followers to the Narragansett country was Rhode Island granted a charter of incorporation