the way for the real American soldier. The hardships, the struggles, the defeats and the slow successes of colonial life brought to the service many leaders skilled in border war and toughened the temper of men from whom sturdy fighters came. Miles Standish's thirteen men, his "great, invincible army," could be duplicated in every one of the struggling settlements that looked out to the eastward upon the stormy Atlantic and westward into the no less dangerous wilderness. From these slender homeguards grew, in time, the provincial militia-men who volunteered for the wars against France and Spain and prepared the way for the greater revolution.

But not always in fighting Indians or invading hostile lands were the colonial fighting-men in arms. Too often were these arms turned against one another. In jealousies of office and in border disputes, in hair-brained endeavors and in open rebellion, time upon time, did brother face brother and neighbor neighbor in the hot encounters of those earliest days.

content.

The very composition of the several colonies fomented disThe mixed character of the settlers aggravated disorder. From the time of beginnings, when Captain John Smith of the Virginia colony-"an adventurer of a high order in an age of adventurers -came into direct conflict with Governor Wingfield and his other associates, down to that later day, when in Boston streets Crispus Attucks and his riotous companions faced, and fell before a platoon of British soldiers, dissatisfaction, jealousies, desire and unrest stirred up continual strife which not unfrequently blazed out into open rebellion. Chief among these popular uprisings, according to chronological order, were: the Ingle roysterings in Maryland in 1645, the Bacon rebellion in Virginia in 1675, the Culpepper revolt in North Carolina in 1677, the revolt of the people.

against aristocratic oppression in 1689-led by Bradstreet in Massachusetts and Leisler in New York; the race "rebellion of Father Sebastian Rasle in Maine in 1724, the election riots in Pennsylvania in 1739, the bloody march of the "Paxton Boys" on Philadelphia in 1763, and the revolt of the Regulators in South Carolina in 1764. The fight at Golden Hill, in New York City, and the Boston Massacre - both disturbances of the year 1770, and both rather vaingloriously claimed. as "the first blood of the Revolution"- fitly closed an hundred and fifty years of struggle, sedition and dispute.

But, through all these (by means, even, of some of them) was the mixed condition of colonial society merging into something definite, into something American. As it took an hundred years and more to make of the caste-hedged emigrant of Europe a free American, so, too, did it need fully a century of emergencies to mold from the pioneer, the borderer and the partisan the real American soldier. For years the American colonist was but a transplanted Englishman, an expatriated Dutchman, an "assisted" German, Frenchman or Swede. These fought, when necessity compelled them, against Indian marauder or border enemy; they resisted, when personal grievances inflamed or local leaders urged them, the invasion of their assumed "rights," but they never marched, as Americans, step to step and shoulder to shoulder, until the final invasion of Canada and the first drum-beats of revolution cemented them together as Americans, as brothers conscious of their own strength and needs.

It was this lack of union that brought the rebellion of Bacon and the bold stand of Leisler to naught. And though each colony, as it grew in numbers and in strength, organized its able-bodied fighting-men into some semblance of a provincial

militia, these "bulwarks of the state" did but little in the way of concerted action, and did that little grudgingly. It takes a great motive to change a partisan into a patriot.

As, around its church or block-house or ragged fort of logs, each struggling settlement grew, the earlier home-guards which might be Captain Standish's

"Twelve men, all equipped, having each his rest and his matchlock,
Eighteen shillings a month, together with diet and pillage,"

or might be the "three and fifty raw and tired Marylanders whom "that noble, right valiant, and politic soldier" Thomas Cornwallis led against the Susquehannas - developed into the Train-Bands or Military-Bands common to each colony.

While from time to time the red-coat garrisons of the king became familiar sights in the larger towns, it was chiefly upon these Train-Bands, made up of their own numbers, that the people of the colonies depended for their military strength. "We know, from more than one incident," says Mr. Doyle, "that there was no lack of individual courage or soldierly skill among the settlers."

In every province the able-bodied male "freeholders" were held subject to military duty. When occasion demanded they could be called upon for active service. The charter of the Maryland province invested the proprietors with the right to "call out and arm the whole fighting population, wage war, take prisoners, and slay alien enemies; also to exercise martial law in case of insurrection." In Massachusetts each town, from the earliest days, had its own military company, for service in which every man was liable, excepting the "magistrates, elders, deacons, shipwrights, millers and fishermen."

The law of 1766 required all males in the colony to attend