by the Potomac. But he reflected that this region was too much exposed to observation from England. He wished to make radical changes in government, and needed a degree of independence he could not have under the eye of king and parliament and exposed to their interference. He thought it quite probable that some time he might have to make forcible resistance to royal or parliamentary interference, and he did not wish for his theater a region exposed to the broadsides of the royal navy. He determined at last that the bulk of his new nation should lie beyond the mountains, where he could veil his operations from the jealous powers of England. One port he wanted, accessible from the ocean. Mortonia was just the place. The water was deep enough, but the channel so narrow that batteries on the shore could defend the place against a navy. He would acquire a narrow belt of land along the Potomac from Mortonia to the river's source, which would afford a pathway from the port to his transmontane realm. There was something in the idea of establishing this empire in the heart of the great virgin continent which appealed so strongly to the ardent imagination of Ralph Morton that he did not
