n Smith,
Bradford, Penn, Bienville and Oglethorpe, and chief among settlements,
Jamestown, Plymouth, New York, Massachusetts Bay, Wilmington,
Philadelphia, New Orleans and Savannah. The several movements, in
their failures as in their successes, were distributed over a century
and three-quarters, but since the coming of Columbus a much longer
period had elapsed. From the discovery to the arrival of Oglethorpe
lie 240 years, or a hundred years more than the period that separates
our day from the years when America gained her independence from
England.

Each center of settlement had been inspired by an impulse separate
from that of others. Alike as some of them were, in having as a moving
cause a desire to escape from persecution, religious or political, or
otherwise to better conditions, they were divided by years, if not by
generations, in time; the settlers came from lands isolated and remote
from one another; they were different as to race, form of government,
and religious and political ideals, and, once communities had been
founded, each expanded on lines of its own and knew little of its
neighbors.

The Spaniards who founded St. Augustine continued long to live there,
but of social and political growth in Spanish Florida there was none.
Spain, in those eventful European years, was fully absorbed elsewhere
in Continental wars which taxed all her strength, especially that
furious war, waged for forty years against Holland, and from which
Spain retired ultimately in failure. In those years also was
overthrown Philip's Armada, an event in which the scepter of
maritime-empire passed from Spain to England.

Of the French settlements the chief was New Orleans, French from the
beginning, and so to remain in racial preponderance, religious
beliefs, and political ideals, for a century and a half after
Bienville founded it--so, in fact, it still remains in our day. But
elsewhere the French gave to the United States no permanent
settlements. Numbers of them came to Florida, only to perish by the
sword; others in large numbers settled in South Carolina, only to
become merged with other races, among whom the English, with their
speech and their laws, became supreme.

On Manhattan Island and in the valleys of the Hudson and lower Mohawk
settled the Dutch a few years after the English at Jamestown. They
erected forts on Manhattan Island and at Albany, Hartford and near
Philadelphia; they partitioned vast tracts of fertile la