received from the home government little direct assistance,
but they throve better without it; and if there was little assistance,
there was also little interference. In the East the English East India
Company had to yield to the Dutch the monopoly of the Malayan trade,
and bitterly complained of the lack of government support; but it
succeeded in establishing several modest factories on the coast of
India, and was on the whole prosperous. But it was in the West that the
distinctive work of the English was achieved during this period, by the
establishment of a series of colonies unlike any other European
settlements which had yet been instituted. Their distinctive feature
was self-government, to which they owed their steadily increasing
prosperity. No other European colonies were thus managed on the
principle of autonomy. Indeed, these English settlements were in 1650
the only self-governing lands in the world, apart from England herself,
the United Provinces, and Switzerland.

The first English colony, Virginia, was planted in 1608 by a trading
company organised for the purpose, whose subscribers included nearly
all the London City Companies, and about seven hundred private
individuals of all ranks. Their motives were partly political ('to put
a bit in the ancient enemy's (Spain's) mouth'), and partly commercial,
for they hoped to find gold, and to render England independent of the
marine supplies which came from the Baltic. But profit was not their
sole aim; they were moved also by the desire to plant a new England
beyond the seas. They made, in fact, no profits; but they did create a
branch of the English stock, and the young squires' and yeomen's sons
who formed the backbone of the colony showed themselves to be
Englishmen by their unwillingness to submit to an uncontrolled
direction of their affairs. In 1619, acting on instructions received
from England, the company's governor summoned an assembly of
representatives, one from each township, to consult on the needs of the
colony. This was the first representative body that had ever existed
outside Europe, and it indicated what was to be the character of
English colonisation. Henceforth the normal English method of governing
a colony was through a governor and an executive council appointed by
the Crown or its delegate, and a representative assembly, which wielded
full control over local legislation and taxation. 'Our present
happiness,' said the Virginian Assembly