the English to cross three thousand miles of
water and found homes in the American wilderness at the opening of the
seventeenth century. Ships, tools, and supplies called for huge outlays
of money. Stores had to be furnished in quantities sufficient to sustain
the life of the settlers until they could gather harvests of their own.
Artisans and laborers of skill and industry had to be induced to risk
the hazards of the new world. Soldiers were required for defense and
mariners for the exploration of inland waters. Leaders of good judgment,
adept in managing men, had to be discovered. Altogether such an
enterprise demanded capital larger than the ordinary merchant or
gentleman could amass and involved risks more imminent than he dared to
assume. Though in later days, after initial tests had been made, wealthy
proprietors were able to establish colonies on their own account, it was
the corporation that furnished the capital and leadership in the
beginning.

=The Trading Company.=--English pioneers in exploration found an
instrument for colonization in companies of merchant adventurers, which
had long been employed in carrying on commerce with foreign countries.
Such a corporation was composed of many persons of different ranks of
society--noblemen, merchants, and gentlemen--who banded together for a
particular undertaking, each contributing a sum of money and sharing in
the profits of the venture. It was organized under royal authority; it
received its charter, its grant of land, and its trading privileges from
the king and carried on its operations under his supervision and
control. The charter named all the persons originally included in the
corporation and gave them certain powers in the management of its
affairs, including the right to admit new members. The company was in
fact a little government set up by the king. When the members of the
corporation remained in England, as in the case of the Virginia Company,
they operated through agents sent to the colony. When they came over the
seas themselves and settled in America, as in the case of Massachusetts,
they became the direct government of the country they possessed. The
stockholders in that instance became the voters and the governor, the
chief magistrate.

[Illustration: JOHN WINTHROP, GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY
COMPANY]

Four of the thirteen colonies in America owed their origins to the
trading corporation. It was the London Company, created by King Jame