Twelve additional articles were subsequently incorporated, the whole instrument receiving final approval on the 21st of June, 1623. The Dutch West India Company, to whose care the conversion of the American wilderness into a habitation for civilized man was thus committed, and under whose auspices European institutions were first planted and organized government was erected and for many years administered here, was in its basic constitution a most notable body, that is practipartaking of the character of a civil congress so far asends. It had a cable for an association pursuing essential mercantile central directorate or executive board, officially styled the assembly of the XIX., which was composed of nineteen delegates, eighteen being elected from five local chambers, and the nineteenth being the 1 Van Pelfs Hist, of the Greater New York. i. 0.

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direct representative of " their High Mightinesses, the [States-General of the United Provinces." The five local chambers were subordinate bodies which met independently, embracing shareholders from Amsterdam, Zeeland, the Meuse (including the cities of Dort, Kotterdam, and Delft), the North Quarter (which comprised the cities of North Holland outside of Amsterdam), and Priesland. The controlling influence in the company was that of the City of Amsterdam, which at first sent eight and later nine delegates to the Assembly of the XIX. The spheres of trade marked out for and confirmed to the company, " to the exclusion of all other inhabitants or associations of merchants within the bounds of the United Provinces," comprehended both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts of the two Americas, from the Straits of Magellan to the extreme north, and, in addition, the African coast from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope. The rights and powers vested in the corporation fell short of those of actual independent sovereignty only in the particulars that the more weighty acts of the company, as declarations of war and conclusions of peace, were subject to the approval of the Dutch government, and that the officers appointed to rule distant countries, and their underlings, should be acceptable to the States-General and should take the oath of fealty to the Netherlands republic.