nth century, for over-population did not exist in any serious
degree in any of the European states until that age. Many of the
political writers in seventeenth-century England, indeed, regarded the
whole movement of colonisation with alarm, because it seemed to be
drawing off men who could not be spared. But if the population was
nowhere excessive, there were in all countries certain classes for
which emigration to new lands offered a desired opportunity. There were
the men bitten with the spirit of adventure, to whom the work of the
pioneer presented an irresistible attraction. Such men are always
numerous in virile communities, and when in any society their numbers
begin to diminish, its decay is at hand. The imperial activities of the
modern age have more than anything else kept the breed alive in all
European countries, and above all in Britain. To this type belonged the
conquistadores of Spain, the Elizabethan seamen, the French explorers
of North America, the daring Dutch navigators. Again, there were the
younger sons of good family for whom the homeland presented small
opportunities, but who found in colonial settlements the chance of
creating estates like those of their fathers at home, and carried out
with them bands of followers drawn from among the sons of their
fathers' tenantry. To this class belonged most of the planter-settlers
of Virginia, the seigneurs of French Canada, the lords of the great
Portuguese feudal holdings in Brazil, and the dominant class in all the
Spanish colonies. Again, there were the 'undesirables' of whom the home
government wanted to be rid--convicts, paupers, political prisoners;
they were drafted out in great numbers to the new lands, often as
indentured servants, to endure servitude for a period of years and then
to be merged in the colonial population. When the loss of the American
colonies deprived Britain of her dumping-ground for convicts, she had
to find a new region in which to dispose of them; and this led to the
first settlement of Australia, six years after the establishment of
American independence. Finally, in the age of bitter religious
controversy there was a constant stream of religious exiles seeking new
homes in which they could freely follow their own forms of worship. The
Puritan settlers of New England are the outstanding example of this
type. But they were only one group among many. Huguenots from France,
Moravians from Austria, persecuted 'Palatines' and Salzbu