ABSTRACT
In all systems of local government, and especially those established in growing communities, questions are bound to arise which require to be submitted to the central authority. And so it was with the seventeenth-century colonies. There were differences of interpretation as to the privileges conferred by colonial charters; differences of interest between one colony and another, particularly questions of boundaries; and, as time went on, there were difficulties over the enforcement of the Navigation Acts. The development into a permanent practice of the seventeenth-century experiments was in a great measure due to the character of constitution established in the colonies. The history of the West Indian colonial agents may most properly be taken to start with the period of the Restoration. At the Restoration the first attempts were being made to build up in England a permanent system of representation.
