ismissed from the bar, deprived of his university degree, and set in
the pillory. His ears were clipped from his head, and the stubborn
lawyer was then taken back to prison to be kept there during the king's
pleasure.

With such a world around them we can hardly wonder that men of less
fanatical turn than Prynne gave way to despair. But it was in this hour
of despair that the Puritans won their noblest triumph. They "turned,"
to use Canning's words in a far truer and grander sense than that which
he gave to them, "they turned to the New World to redress the balance of
the Old." It was during the years which followed the close of the third
Parliament of Charles that a great Puritan migration founded the States
of New England.

[Sidenote: Virginia.]

Ralegh's settlement on the Virginian coast, the first attempt which
Englishmen had made to claim North America for their own, had soon
proved a failure. The introduction of tobacco and the potato into Europe
dates from his voyage of discovery, but the energy of his colonists was
distracted by the delusive dream of gold, the hostility of the native
tribes drove them from the coast, and it is through the gratitude of
later times for what he strove to do, rather than for what he did, that
Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, preserves his name. The first
permanent settlement on the Chesapeake was effected in the beginning of
the reign of James the First, and its success was due to the conviction
of the settlers that the secret of the New World's conquest lay simply
in labour. Among the hundred and five colonists who originally landed,
forty-eight were gentlemen, and only twelve were tillers of the soil.
Their leader, John Smith, however, not only explored the vast Bay of
Chesapeake and discovered the Potomac and the Susquehannah, but held
the little company together in the face of famine and desertion till the
colonists had learned the lesson of toil. In his letters to the
colonizers at home he set resolutely aside the dream of gold. "Nothing
is to be expected thence," he wrote of the new country, "but by labour";
and supplies of labourers, aided by a wise allotment of land to each
colonist, secured after five years of struggle the fortunes of Virginia.
"Men fell to building houses and planting corn"; the very streets of
Jamestown, as their capital was called from the reigning sovereign, were
sown with tobacco; and in fifteen years the colony numbered five
thousand souls.