by a Spanish fleet which resented the settlement of Englishmen in a
land that was claimed for Spain, or by famine or disease, no one knows
to this day. The one permanent result was the giving of the name
Virginia to their American land in honor of their Queen.

Following the failure of this first effort, a plan was formulated and
established by charter given by King James in the year 1606. Under this
charter companies were to be formed in order to found two English
settlements in America; one to be a colony at some point between the
34th and 41st degrees of latitude, and the other between the 38th and
45th degrees. Both companies had the widespread interest of the English
people, and both made settlements in America in the same year, 1607.
The Virginia Company established its settlement at Jamestown, from
which developed the Colony, and later the Commonwealth of Virginia, as
the first permanent English settlement in America. The Plymouth Company
made its settlement upon the coast of what is now Maine; but this
effort failed and the colonists returned home in the following year.
Permanent settlement of New England began in 1620 with the coming of
the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts. From these two first
settlements thus widely separated, but with their common ideal of
English civilization and English concepts of freedom and
self-government, has grown the American nation of today. This nation,
while welcoming all the gifts and values which people of other nations
have brought to the enrichment and broadening of our common life, is
still basically an English or Anglo-Saxon nation.

Many impelling motives animated the men who organized the Virginia
company and labored for the establishment of a colony in America. They
wanted of course the expansion of British trade and a wider market for
British manufactures; and they naturally hoped for financial profit
from their investment in shares of stock in the companies. They
planned, also, not merely trading posts in a foreign land as in India
and elsewhere, but an extension and expansion of the empire of Great
Britain.

A most important part of their plan was to make colonies the answer to
a problem which was pressing for solution: the problem of what to do
with the increasing overplus of population in many of the cities of
England. The danger of a population too great for the land of England
to support and feed was a real one. A colony to which England could
send her overp