that they were glad on the first opportunity to return to England. In 1587, a second party of colonists, a hundred and fifty in number, with Captain John White for their leader, went to take their place. But they were even more unfortunate than their predecessors. Abandoned by their friends at home, all were killed by the natives, except a few who wandered inland and gave up their English habits to share the life of the red men who afforded them shelter.

The disastrous issue of Gilbert's and Raleigh's projects, however, offered no serious obstacles to the progress of English colonization. These were

only the first pulsations in a movement which was to result in a wonderful extension of English power and influence, and to effect a social revolution to which modern history presents no parallel.

England was behind-hand in the planting of colonies. Spain had begun a century before to take possession of the most attractive portions of the vast American continent. Portugal, Germany, and France had followed the example before anything of importance was done by England. But at length she entered on the work with unrivalled energy, an energy that has had no abatement down to the present day. The early delay and the subsequent eagerness resulted from the same cause. During the sixteenth century England was too busy with her internal affairs and with European politics to enter upon any sustained work in distant quarters. testantism, taking deeper root and having healthier growth in our little island than almost in any other state, had a hard battle to fight both at home and

Pro

ENGLAND'S WAR WITH SPAIN.

9

abroad. Its first great work was in overthrowing the old system of feudalism which, strengthened in past centuries by Catholicism, was now its main source of strength, and in building up those foundations of religious freedom which have become the bases of the political, and, in a measure, the social freedom that have made England a great and powerful nation. That work induced an apparently overwhelming force of opposition from the far greater powers of France and Spain, which, not content with open warfare, sought to gain their end by fostering internal dissension and stirring up hatred and rebellion among the classes who, on religious or other grounds, were most in sympathy with the great Catholic nations. Warfare, open and secret, was the grand business of Englishmen during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth. The men who, in other circumstances, would have become great leaders of colonization, with Sir Francis Drake for their most illustrious representative, expended all their wit and strength in resistance of the great enemies of their country. But that resistance, wholly patriotic, though it was not in all respects praiseworthy, was in the end very helpful to the progress of colonization. Drake and his fellows, urged thereto by their opposition to Spain, swept the seas, both near and distant, that were traversed by the ships laden with the fruits of the Spanish colonies. They became the terror of the European coasts. Their pirate-ships also scoured the West Indian waters, and even made their way to the more distant haunts of Spanish commerce on the Pacific shores of America and in the Indian archipelago. Thus

English seamen learnt to ply their craft with unmatched daring, and, when the proper time arrived, to plant their colonies in the most favoured quarters of the world, and in other quarters, less favoured by nature, which were made propitious by the wisdom and the perseverance of the colonists themselves.

Concerning the first great outcomes of this commercial and colonizing spirit this volume has not to treat in detail. The wonderful history of the East India Company, started near the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, by which, in the course of two centuries and a half, our vast Indian empire has been established, is rather a history of trade and conquest than of colonization, and to it brief incidental reference in a future page will suffice. The no less wonderful history of the great colonial work in which Englishmen were engaged in America during the seventeenth century-a theme so wide and eventful that more than a volume would be needed for its separate handling-is precluded from our plan, because the colonies thus founded, no longer British possessions, have become themselves a powerful nation as the United States of America. A few paragraphs, therefore, will serve for summing up all that here needs to be told concerning them.

The work, begun with Raleigh's luckless experiments, was first successfully entered upon by two companies of "knights, gentlemen, and merchants"

1 Another reason for not recounting this story is that it has been so often told before. An especially concise and interesting account of it will be found in pp. 180-384 of Miss Elizabeth Cooper's "Popular History of America."

THE SETTLEMENTS IN AMERICA.

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-the one party belonging to London, the other to the west of England-to whom jointly a charter for the colonization of America, under Raleigh's name of Virginia, was granted by James I. in 1606. Three small ships full of emigrants left England for that purpose near the end of the year, and the difficult task of planting the little colony was achieved by Captain John Smith, whose tact in making friends with the Indians by help of the native king Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas, has been often described in history and romance. The settlement was steadily recruited by fresh arrivals from England, and directed with tolerable success by later governors, who followed to some extent in the course marked out by Smith. Its first important trade was in tobacco, which, sold in Europe, enabled the colonists to supply themselves with all needful commodities from the mother country. A great resort of cavaliers and their dependants during the times of civil war and Commonwealth rule in England, it became the most aristocratic of the American settlements, the centre of agriculture and slavery.

On the northern part of the district originally assigned to Virginia was founded the colony of Maryland, so named in honour of Queen Henrietta Maria, in 1632, with Lord Baltimore for its originator. Designed by him as a settlement especially for fugitive Catholics, it soon fell into the hands of persecuting Protestants, yet under them attained great prosperity.

Still more prosperous were the colonies founded and developed during the same period by the Puritans. "The land is weary of her inhabitants," said

the Pilgrim Fathers who quitted England in the Mayflower in 1620, "so that man which is the most precious of all creatures is here more vile and base than the earth we tread upon; so as children, neighbours, and friends, especially the poor, are accounted the greatest burthens, which, if things were right, would be the highest earthly blessings. Hence it comes to pass that all arts and trades are carried on in that deceitful manner and unrighteous course as it is almost impossible for a good, upright man to maintain his charge in any of them." Driven thus from old England, they set up their new England on the western shores of the Atlantic, and, as tide after tide of emigrants crossed the ocean, one city after another was founded, until in 1643 there were four goodly groups of settlements, known as Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Newhaven, which organized themselves as the United Colonies of New England, the first germ of the United States. The Puritan plantations grew mightily. But Milton has said that "new Presbyter is but old Priest writ large," and so it proved with the champions of religious freedom in the New World. The liberty which they claimed for themselves was denied to all who differed from them, and persecution was as rife in America as in England. One great benefit, however, sprang therefrom. Not only did fresh streams of emigration flow from England, but hardlyused members of the established colonies branched off to establish younger colonies for themselves; and thus the entire coast-line was rapidly peopled with enterprising settlers, who, seeking their own wealth and comfort, turned the whole region, from