venture in Roanoke, and his half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert's earlier attempt to hold Newfoundland, may indeed be taken as the starting-points of our colonial history. Yet both failed. They were forerunners, examples, or warnings. Our plantations began truly when Englishmen first landed on the soil of America never to return, and that was when the servants of the London Virginia Company made their first fort on the James River in 1607. Englishmen were already well acquainted with the Atlantic seaboard of America, and were still more familiar with the Antilles, as privateers, raiders, or even as fishermen. They were so well known in their character of armed smugglers or semi-piratical intruders to those most concerned in watching their activity-the Spaniards to wit-that the ambassadors of Philip III. at the Court of James I. kept a nervous eye on the establishment of the New Algiers' in Virginia. The servants of the Sacra 'Católica y Cesárea Majestad,' his Sacred, Catholic, and Cesarean Majesty at Madrid, would have been comparatively easy in their minds if they could have been sure that those English poachers beyond the line of demarcation drawn by Pope Alexander VI. from north to south to secure the sphere of influence of Spain, could be trusted to apply themselves only to raising crops. They would even have regarded the spread of the destructive heretical principles of Luther and Calvin among the remote Indians of the North with resignation, though the spectacle was pain and grief to them. They said it was so, often and eloquently. But then it was incredible to Don Pedro de Zuñiga, Don Alonso de Velasco, and Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, that the English would poach in this comparatively innocent fashion. The Spanish diplomatists, looking to experience, relying on their knowledge of human nature, and diligently collecting gossip, were convinced that the true purpose of the newly formed Virginia Company was very different. In December 1609, Don Pedro de Zuñiga had no hesitation in assuring his master that what was really meant was this: all English pirates, then a numerous body along the Channel and on the west coast of Ireland, were to be offered a pardon on condition that they went to Virginia to make a New Algiers.' He had the best authority for saying that the thing is so perfectaccording to what they say-for making use of these pirates,

'that your Majesty will not be able to get silver from the 'Indies unless a very large force shall be kept there, and that ' will make your Majesty's vassals lose their trade.' Therefore, so he pleaded again and again, let no time be lost in stamping the settlement out.

It cannot fairly be said that the fears of Don Pedro were absurd. Yet he was wrong. The colonists went to Virginia for quite different objects, and throve by ways most unlike piracy. If we try to put the whole purpose and spirit of the first English plantations into a nutshell we shall have to say that their purpose was to complete England by providing her with territory wherein she could find mines and could cultivate many native products she did not grow at home. Their spirit was one of sober, practical, businesslike morality. Incidentally, but with a very present sense of the advantages to be obtained, they hoped to draw off and reform by profitable industry the large and then most pestilent vagabond population by which the land was afflicted. It was the product of social and economic changes, and of generations of civil war. The first organisers made the attempt with the inevitable result. Elements, whereof the last quality which could be predicated was morality, were included in the first settlement. Bacon was thinking of them when he said:

'It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant; and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation; for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief, and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their country to the discredit of the plantation.'

It was not long before the Virginia Company had to confess its error, and mend its choice of settlers. But it was prompt to learn its lesson. There is a little passage in its history of an illuminative character. After struggles of a painful rather than heroic kind the plantation was beginning to prosper: not by the plunder of Spanish plate ships, but by the cultivation of tobacco. This drug, this weed, was denounced by all wise men, but it paid and it conquered. But if it was to be raised steadily the Company saw that there must be a permanent English population to carry on the cultivation, whether with or without the service of bondsmen. The planters so far were a somewhat unstable community, liable for one

thing to be tempted away to the Antilles. It was manifestly desirable to tie them to the soil. The Spanish government of the time, or the French, would have made laws and threatened penalties-probably to no purpose. The Company found a way at once gentle and efficacious. It provided them with wives. A small joint-stock company was formed within the great one, and a capital of £1200 was subscribed. Sixty young women of good character (the Company called them uncorrupted virgins), and we may assume of not unpleasing personal appearance, were collected and sent out under charge of a judicious widow. The cost of transport was estimated at £12 10s. a head. Care was taken to explain to the planters that marriage was really what was meant, and that freedom was essential to the validity of matrimony. But as the Company had been at the trouble and the cost of making them happy the least the planters could do was to show a sense of the obligation by paying to its agents so many leaves of the best tobacco as would cover the expenses of the passage, and allow the shareholders a little honest profit for themselves. It is unfortunate that no record remains of any of the courtships conducted in these circumstances. One thing, however, is certain, and it is that the wooings were not long adoing. The young women were very loving received,' and all married off in a few weeks. The planters paid their tobacco-leaves manfully, and the net profits of the transaction were £540.

This humble undertaking must be allowed to lack the romance of the conquest of the lake city of Tenochtitlan, or Gonzalo de Pizarro's stupendous march in search of El Dorado, or the Odyssey of Hernan de Soto in the Mississippi valley. But it had in it the future of an orderly, industrious, and eminently human, English community. Spain tried to keep down and even to prevent the entry of Spanish women into the Indies. France sent out wives to its colonists, but they went out either under charge of nuns and as mere instruments in the hands of a clerical domination, or they were recruited in the way we may read of in the story of Manon Lescaut. The Virginia Company aimed at founding a free oversea England, based on a population working for wife and child in an honest English way. Manon Lescaut did indeed find her way to America, and criminals were sent out as bondsmen. So were Scotch and Irish prisoners of the Civil War.

Some justified the system of transportation by adding themselves in time to the orderly population. And that was particularly the case with the Scotch prisoners of Preston, Dunbar, and Worcester. Others followed their natural instincts, which carried them to piracy and to the freebooting life of the Brothers of the Coast. The Adam and Eve of Virginia did not come from Newgate: only a part of their servants came from that starting-place.

It would be quite superfluous to labour to prove that the Puritan settlements at Cape Cod and on Massachusetts Bay were designed to be free English communities leading a normal life. But even now it is not quite superfluous to contradict the still surviving assumption that the Puritan was an ascetic and a kill-joy. When you wish to know what men thought, not the worst way of learning is to look at what they said. 'The abuse of the creature' was a phrase much in use among them. It sounds strange, even absurd to some of us. And yet it was not meaningless. Let us put aside the rather silly disinclination to use religious phraseology, for we shall never get near the real meaning of the Puritan if we do not. The

creature' was all the creation of God, given to man for his use and enjoyment, subject to the stern warning that he would be brought to judgment for abuse of God's work. The Puritan found a code of morals in the text' Rejoice, O young man, in 'thy youth, and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart and the sight of 'thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will 'bring thee into judgment.'

The old Low Country soldier in Massachusetts, of whom it is recorded that he said he had received his 'assurance of grace' while he was 'drinking a pipe of the good creature 'tobacco,' may have been an impudent scamp. He cannot have wished to arouse the suspicions of the men he was speaking to. They can have seen no incompatibility between being in grace and using the 'good creatures.' Sin lay in the abuse of them.

It was a manly standard of morals, infinitely superior to the formalism and fetishism of the Spanish American world, or the queasy pietism and the clerical dictation of French Canada. Moreover, it was intensely English. The New England settlers were English to the marrow of their bones. When the proposal

was made to them that they should leave the poor soil and hard climate of Massachusetts and swarm off to the warm West Indies, Winthrop answered for them that they would stay where they were because there it was possible for them to live as they had lived in England. That they might fulfil their wish the better, they set their faces against that mixture with the Indian races which filled Spanish America with 'mestizos' and French Canada with 'Bois Brûlés.' They would be an uncorrupted English community, living a human life with the certainty of judgment before their eyes.

In that very determination, however, lay one of the causes of the long unwillingness of English colonists to unite among themselves or to feel that they were really one with the Mother Country. His own community was much to the English colonist-a home apart from other homes-and then he was forced to think much of his 'rights' in all his relations with the Mother Country. There is one history of Virginia, another of Massachusetts, and another of the settlements in the islands. Yet, however much they might differ, they had one feature in common they were founded at the charges of those who sent the settlers out, and at the hazard of those settlers. The State and in the seventeenth century the word meant the King-would encourage plantation, would give charters, for which he was paid fees; would authorise lotteries for the purpose of raising money; he would, in short, do whatever cost him nothing. Neither funds nor protection were to be expected from him. The statesmen, lawyers, and merchants who formed, and, while it was allowed to live, governed, the London Virginia Company-Southampton, Warwick, Sandys, Sir Thomas Smyth, and others of less renown-were in the old sense of the word the adventurers' who risked their money. Smyth assured Gondomar that the Company had sunk £47,000 and had as yet had no return. Now, if we measure not by the purchasing power of money-an obscure subject--but by the relative importance of sums of money, £47,000 in the London of James I. was at least as large a part of the capital available for investment as some round millions would be now. And to this the King contributed nothing. The Western, or Exeter, or Plymouth, Virginia Company, whose territory lay to the north of that assigned to the London Company, spent less, but gained no more. It had in the end to make