planted; the attempts to make Huguenot settlements in Brazil (1558) and Florida had been unsuccessful, and French claims there had been abandoned under Spanish influence. It was not until 1609, when Hudson sailed up the river named for him, that the Dutch laid any claims to American soil. Cabral discovered Brazil for the Portuguese in 1500; but when Portugal, eighty years later, became the dependency of Spain (a condition lasting sixty years), her South American colonies were harried by the Dutch, though she did not relinquish control of them. The English claimed all the North American coast from Newfoundland to Florida, and of course through to the Pacific, no one then entertaining the belief that the continent was many hundred miles in width; but as yet none of their colonizing efforts had been successful. The Bermudas, Bahamas, and Barbados were neither claimed nor settled by Englishmen until the seventeenth century. The great Mississippi basin had been visited by a few Spanish overland wanderers, but as yet was practically forgotten and unclaimed, except so far as it was included in the undefined Spanish and English transcontinental zones; the Hudson Bay country, Oregon, and Alaska were also undiscovered lands. A few thousand miles of American coast-line were now familiar to European explorers; but of the interior of the continent scarcely more was known than might be seen over the tree-tops from the mast-head of a caravel.

Bibliographies. - Lucas's Introduction to Historical Geography of British Colonies, pp. vii, viii; Andrews's Brief Institutes of our Constitutional History, select bibliography to Lecture IV.; Lalor's Cyclopædia, iii. 1019; Allen's History Topics.

Historical Maps. - No. 2, this volume; MacCoun's Historical Geography of the United States; Maps in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History, vols. ii., iii., iv., passim.

General Accounts. - Lucas's Historical Geography of the British Colonies is an excellent succinct review of the colonial policies of the European States. See also on this subject, Seeley's Expansion of England, pp. 37-97; the chapter "Of Colonies' in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; Doyle's English Colonies in America, i. 75-77, 101-104; Freeman's Historical Geography of Europe, 1. 364, 365, 558, 562, 577-583; Merivale's Lectures on Colonization and the Colonies; Forster's Our Colonial Empire; Dilke's Greater Britain, and his recent Problems of Greater Britain, on the present colonies; Creasy's Imperial and Colonial Constitutions of the Britannic Empire; Mill's Colonial Constitutions; Johnston's United States, pp. 1-22. - On the free institutions imported by the American colonists, and on colonial government generally, read Story on the Constitution, §§ 1-97, 582; Wilson's The State, §§ 832-864; Freeman's English People in its Three Homes, pp. 169-201; Hannis Taylor's Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, pp. 15-48; Fiske's American Political Ideas; Channing's Town and County Government in the English Colonies of North America (Johns Hopkins University Studies, 2d series, vol. ii. No. 10)..

18. Colonial Policy of European States.

THE time had now come for making the first permanent English settlement in America. Before we proceed

to the story of that famous enterprise, however, it will be well hastily to summarize the colonial policies of those European States which have at various times established plantations in the New World. It will be well also to know what sort of people were the seed of English colonization, and what institutions they brought with them as the foundations of American commonwealths.

Four motives, working either singly or conjointly, lead to colonization, the spirit of adventurous enterprise, Motives of the desire for wealth, economic or political colonization. discontent, and religious sentiment. For instance, Columbus was quite as much a religious enthusiast desirous of spreading the gospel in new lands as he was an adventurer; the southern group of English colonies in America was in the main the outgrowth of a trading spirit working in conjunction with economic distress in England; and the Puritan migration to New England was impelled by economic and political causes, as well as by religious.

Colonization

is the expansion of the parent State,

In a large sense the planting of a colony means merely the expansion of the parent State. But this was not the view formerly taken by European govern ments. For a long time colonies were treated as dependencies of the mother-country, existing chiefly to furnish revenue to the latter. either directly in taxes or indirectly in increased trade. It was because the English colonists in America, taking though early a broad view of their relationship to Great viewed as a Britain, wished to be treated as free Engrevenue to it. lishmen in Greater Britain, and not merely as revenue-producing subjects, that they revolted in 1776. Colonial history is nearly everywhere the history of this obtuseness of vision on the part of the home government, and it is full of most painful details.

source of

1492-1600.]

Spain and Portugal.

19. Spanish and Portuguese Policy.

47

It chanced that the American discoveries made by Spain were in the region of rich and physically weak nations. Consequently she won her vast doSpain. minions on this continent by sweeping conquest rather than by commercial growth. This was in sharp contrast with the slow, steady planting of New England, where the settlers were obliged to conquer a sterile soil and brave a rigid climate, where they were hemmed about with savage neighbors who disputed their establishment, and where they met as well the sharp opposition, first of the Dutch, and then of the French, the latter, in their desire for the Mississippi valley, jealously endeavoring to restrict Englishmen to the Atlantic slope. The Spaniards were brave, and they could rule with severity. But they thirsted for adventure, conquest, and wealth, for which their appetite was early encouraged; their progress in Mexico, Peru, and the West Indies had been too rapid and brilliant for them to be satisfied with the dull life and patient development of an agricultural colony. Had they known in advance the conditions of success on the North American mainland, it is probable that we should never have been obliged to chronicle the splendid but disastrous expeditions of Narvaez and De Soto. They would doubtless have made no attempt to subdue a land which offered nothing for such appetites as theirs. Their aims were sordid, their State was loosely knit, their commer cial policy was rigidly exclusive, their morals were lax, and their treatment of the savages was cruel, despite the tendency of the colonists to amalgamate with the latter, and thus to descend in the scale of civilization. The effect of the specie so easily acquired in Mexico and Peru was to make Spain rapidly rich without manufac

tures; but her people were thereby demoralized and unfitted for the ordinary channels of employment, and her rulers were corrupted and enfeebled; in the end the country was impoverished, declining as rapidly as it had risen. Spain's glory was fast waning both in the New and the Old World at the close of the sixteenth century, and France was ready, in the march of events, to succeed to her place as the leading nation of Europe. France was to be supplanted a century later by England, which was not known as a great power until the dispersion of the Armada. We have seen that in this historical progress Spain unwittingly helped England by driving the French out from Florida and Carolina; nevertheless the decline of Spain left France the most formidable rival of the English.

The Portuguese, though impelled by a similar passion for conquest, were more eager for trade than their power. ful and often domineering Spanish neighbors. Portugal. They oppressed their colonies, were greedy in their commercial strivings, maltreated the weak natives of Brazil and the West Indies, lacked administrative ability and the spirit of progress, and suffered from want of a well-balanced colonial system. The Portuguese colonies in America had much the same history as the Spanish, their situation being similar. Brazil was of no great importance until the early years of the nineteenth century, and made herself independent in 1822,- thus following the lead of Mexico, which set up an independent government in the same year.

20. French Policy.

France had no permanent colonies in America before the seventeenth century. Port Royal was planted in 1604, and Quebec not until four years later. The French were good fighters, enterprising, and while not eager