ments was the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the
Hudson. Within the limits of these colonies dwelt a population of more
than seventy thousand people, economically self-sufficing, possessed of
well-defined political institutions and clearly marked types of social
and intellectual life. The English migration and the founding of the
English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the
colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in
America were different from those which statesmen and traders had
imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined
by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their
birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the
wilderness, and by the wilderness itself--the circumstances which, in
the new country, closed them round.

The motives which induced many Englishmen to come to America in the
seventeenth century must be sought in the profound social changes
occurring in the time of Elizabeth and the first Stuarts. The high hopes
with which the Virginia Company looked forward to successful
colonization were partly inspired by the prevailing belief that England
was overpopulated. There was much to justify the belief. The reign of
Elizabeth witnessed a striking increase in the number of unemployed, the
poverty-stricken, and the vagabond. The destruction of the monasteries
left the poor and defenseless without their accustomed sources of
relief; while steadily rising prices, due partly to the increased supply
of silver from the Spanish-American mines, were not infrequently
disastrous to those who were already living close to the margin of
subsistence. As never before country roads and the streets of towns were
encumbered with the vagrant poor, and the jails and almshouses were
filling up, as a result of Elizabethan legislation, with petty thieves,
"rogues and sturdy beggars."

That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the
advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful
colonization, said the author of _Nova Britannia_ in 1609, but two
things are essential, people and money; and "for the first wee need not
doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee
seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide
shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions." Yet for
more than a decade one of the chief difficulties