Our Foreigners | Page 2

Hakluyt, when he declared that America could bring "as great
a profit to the Realme of England as the Indes to the King of Spain,"
that "golde, silver, copper, leade and perales in aboundaunce" had
been found there: also "precious stones, as turquoises and emauraldes;
spices and drugges; silke worms fairer than ours in Europe; white and
red cotton; infinite multitude of all kind of fowles; excellent vines in
many places for wines; the soyle apte to beare olyves for oyle; all kinds
of fruites; all kindes of odoriferous trees and date trees, cypresses, and
cedars; and in New-founde-lande aboundaunce of pines and firr trees
to make mastes and deale boards, pitch, tar, rosen; hempe for cables
and cordage; and upp within the Graunde Baye excedinge quantitie of
all kinde of precious furres." Such a catalogue of resources led him to
conclude that "all the commodities of our olde decayed and daungerous
trades in all Europe, Africa and Asia haunted by us, may in short space
and for little or nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America
which lieth between 30 and 60 degrees of northerly latitude."
Even after repeated expeditions had discounted the exuberant optimism
of this description, the Englishmen's faith did not wane. While for
many years there lurked in the mind of the Londoner, the hope that
some of the products of the Levant might be raised in the fertile valleys
of Virginia, the practical English temperament none the less began
promptly to appease itself with the products of the vast forests, the
masts, the tar and pitch, the furs; with the fish from the coast waters,
the abundant cod, herring, and mackerel; nor was it many years before
tobacco, indigo, sugar, cotton, maize, and other commodities brought to
the merchants of England a great American commerce.
The first attempts to found colonies in the country by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were pitiable failures. But the settlement
on the James in 1607 marked the beginning of a nation. What sort of
nation? What race of people? Sir Walter Raleigh, with true English
tenacity, had said after learning of the collapse of his own colony, "I
shall yet live to see it an English nation." The new nation certainly was
English in its foundation, whatever may be said of its superstructure.
Virginia, New England, Maryland, the Carolinas, New Jersey,

Pennsylvania, and Georgia were begun by Englishmen; and New
England, Virginia, and Maryland remained almost entirely English
throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. These
colonies reproduced, in so far as their strange and wild surroundings
permitted, the towns, the estates, and the homes of Englishmen of that
day. They were organized and governed by Englishmen under English
customs and laws; and the Englishman's constitutional liberties were
their boast until the colonists wrote these rights and privileges into a
constitution of their own. "Foreigners" began early to straggle into the
colonies. But not until the eighteenth century was well under way did
they come in appreciable numbers, and even then the great bulk of
these non-English newcomers were from the British Isles--of Welsh,
Scotch, Irish, and Scotch-Irish extraction.
These colonies took root at a time when profound social and religious
changes were occurring in England. Churchmen and dissenters were at
war with each other; autocracy was struggling to survive the
representative system; and agrarianism was contending with a newly
created capitalism for economic supremacy. The old order was
changing. In vain were attempts made to stay progress by labor laws
and poor laws and corn laws. The laws rather served to fill the
highways with vagrants, vagabonds, mendicants, beggars, and worse.
There was a general belief that the country was overpopulated. For the
restive, the discontented, the ambitious, as well as for the undesirable
surplus, the new colonies across the Atlantic provided a welcome
outlet.
To the southern plantations were lured those to whom land-owning
offered not only a means of livelihood but social distinction. As word
was brought back of the prosperity of the great estates and of the
limitless areas awaiting cultivation, it tempted in substantial numbers
those who were dissatisfied with their lot: the yeoman who saw no
escape from the limitations of his class, either for himself or for his
children; the younger son who disdained trade but was too poor to keep
up family pretensions; professional men, lawyers, and doctors, even
clergymen, who were ambitious to become landed gentlemen; all these
felt the irresistible call of the New World.

The northern colonies were, on the other hand, settled by townfolk, by
that sturdy middle class which had wedged its way socially between the
aristocracy and the peasantry, which asserted itself politically in the
Cromwellian Commonwealth and later became the industrial master of
trade and manufacture. These hard-headed