Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/33

 CHAPTER I. THE FIRST CENTURY OF ENGLISH COLONISATION. ON none of the nations of Europe had the discovery of America an effect so great as upon England. From the trade of the Mediterranean she was wholly excluded; for that of the Baltic she competed at a disadvantage with the ports of the Netherlands and Germany. In the struggle for the commerce of the New World, England for the first time met all rivals on equal terms ; and the scale was turned in her favour by internal conditions. Spain indeed had it in her power to have built up an empire beyond the Atlantic which might have ranked with Roman Gaul or British India. But that which an intervening ocean made difficult, the national life of Spain made impossible. Slave-holding became a necessity : a scanty colonial population was swamped and barbarised in its contact with inferior races ; the thirst for gold strangled sober and patient industry. Most fatal weakness of all, the Spaniard underwent no such training for the work of administration as long experience of self-government had given to the Roman and the English- man. No tradition of public morality barred the path of the self-seeking adventurer. In France England might have found a rival for the control of North America. But the bigotry of Valois kings and Guise statesmen had alienated from them the one element most fit for the task of colonisation. The wars of religion had drained her natural resources and divided her inhabitants into two hostile camps. There was in France no lack of the daring spirit of adventure or of patient commercial industry; but the two qualities were not combined. In England there was no sharp line of division between the trader and the soldier ; there was a plentiful supply of men who combined the heroism of the Spanish discoverer with a capacity for sober industry. Happily too for English colonisation, dreams of El Dorado and vague cravings for a colonial empire not built up by the steady labour of centuries but won in a moment by the sword, had died away before the epoch of colonisation proper began. . M. B.. VII. CH. I. 1