of three centuries has made the
United States of America. That movement of races--first across the sea
and then across the land to yet another sea, which set in with the
English occupation of Virginia in 1607 and which has continued from
that day to this an almost ceaseless stream of millions of human
beings seeking in the New World what was denied them in the Old--has
no parallel in history.

It was not until the seventeenth century that the door of the
wilderness of North America was opened by Englishmen; but, if we are
interested in the circumstances and ideas which turned Englishmen
thither, we must look back into the wonderful sixteenth century--and
even into the fifteenth, for; it was only five or six years after the
great Christopher's discovery, that the Cabots, John and Sebastian,
raised the Cross of St. George on the North American coast. Two
generations later, when the New World was pouring its treasure into
the lap of Spain and when all England was pulsating with the new and
noble life of the Elizabethan Age, the sea captains of the Great Queen
challenged the Spanish monarch, defeated his Great Armada, and
unfurled the English flag, symbol of a changing era, in every sea.

The political and economic thought of the sixteenth century was
conducive to imperial expansion. The feudal fragments of kingdoms were
being fused into a true nationalism. It was the day of the
mercantilists, when gold and silver were given a grotesquely
exaggerated place in the national economy and self-sufficiency was
deemed to be the goal of every great nation. Freed from the restraint
of rivals, the nation sought to produce its own raw material, control
its own trade, and carry its own goods in its own ships to its own
markets. This economic doctrine appealed with peculiar force to the
people of England. England was very far from being self-sustaining.
She was obliged to import salt, sugar, dried fruits, wines, silks,
cotton, potash, naval stores, and many other necessary commodities.
Even of the fish which formed a staple food on the English workman's
table, two-thirds of the supply was purchased from the Dutch.
Moreover, wherever English traders sought to take the products of
English industry, mostly woolen goods, they were met by
handicaps--tariffs, Sound dues, monopolies, exclusions, retaliations,
and even persecutions.

So England was eager to expand under her own flag. With the fresh
courage and buoyancy of youth she fitted o