20
BRITISH COLONIAL POLICY
Gattend
Com
panies.
Queen- We need not follow the unhappy experiences of Raleigh’s first colonists. The fault of their failure was not in any way due to his neglect. Doubtless he was under the illusions of his day. He looked too much for gold as the product of the country, and he did not perhaps take care to secure the best kind of settlers. Nevertheless, if his great words have been fulfilled in a sense wider than he could have dreamed of, “ I shall yet live to see it an Inglishe nation,” 1 it was largely to the impulse that his personality gave to the movement that this result has been due.
Over twenty years, however, were to pass by between Raleigh’s first expedition and the permanent settlement of the English in Virginia. Several voyages were undertaken during the first years of the seventeenth century; but the real history of the Colony begins with the formation of the Virginia Company in the year 1606.
Upon the first appearance upon our scene of the Chartered Company, an instrument which has played so great a part in the history of the Colonial policy of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a few words must be given to the general question. Whatever be the arguments in favour of colonisation by companies at the present time, in the seventeenth century such companies were an absolute necessity. It has been said 2 that their “ encouragement springs from the timidity or caution of Governments, companies rush in where the messenger of Governments fears to tread.” But in early times companies rush in where the messenger of Government cannot tread. Its continual pretensions to power must not blind us to the weakness of the mediaeval state ; the constant repetition of legislation on the same subjects is the most convincing testimony of the impotence of such legislation. When we reflect upon the fate which has attended Factory Acts, where, as in certain states of America, they have not been enforced by paid inspectors, we discover the weak point in the Tudor and Stuart systems. In the absence of credit, in the scarcity of revenue, and in the corruption which caused the
1 Letter to Cecil, Aug. 21, 1602, in Life, VoL II. p. 252, by E. Edwards.
* Mr C. A. Harris in Palgrare’s Diet, of Political Eton., art. Colonies.