its
great East Indiamen acquired a fame unique in the annals of commerce;
and the corporation itself, with privileges confirmed and extended by
Charles II, was destined in the eighteenth century to be the chief
instrument in the establishment of England's Indian Empire.

IV

When English knights and merchants set out to establish colonies in the
New World, two familiar institutions were convenient to the purpose--the
proprietary feudal grant, and the chartered trading company; noblemen
ambitious for personal dominion turned naturally to the former, while
merchants intent upon profits turned as naturally to the latter. The
first hapless ventures in American planting, dominated by the idealistic
and militant temper of the Elizabethan age, were initiated and directed
in the spirit of the gentleman adventurer: in the spirit of Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, who identified America with the fabled Atlantis and lost his
life in a pathetic attempt to establish an English colony in
Newfoundland; in the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose famous lost
colony, settled in the year 1587, exhausted his fortune and disappeared
at last, leaving no trace. These men were less interested in profit than
in reputation; less intent upon commercial expansion than on the
extension of the queen's dominions. But their resources were too
limited, their ideals too little practical for the realization of their
dreams. The patents to Gilbert and Raleigh took the form of a grant of
lordship by feudal tenure; and from the papers left by the former we
can create again, even to details, his vision of a transformed
wilderness, America's future state: an America of extensive proprietary
domains; an America reproducing, in its lords and landed gentry
surrounded by freeholder and tenant, in its counties and boroughs and
parishes, the social and political aristocracy of old England.

The proprietary feudal grant was destined to play its part in the
colonization of America, but the resplendent vision of Gilbert did not
survive the reign of Elizabeth. Raleigh was the last of the great
Elizabethan adventurers, and with the accession of the pedantic James I
the New World was beginning to be regarded in the dry light of a
commercial opportunity. To the knights and merchants who had witnessed
the vain efforts of Gilbert and Raleigh, the chartered company seemed
better adapted to their purposes than the proprietary grant. The methods
that had proved fortunate in the Old