community.
'I shall yet live to see it an English nation,' he wrote--at the very
moment when Champlain was first dreaming of the St Lawrence. Coligny and
Raleigh were both constructive statesmen. The one was murdered before he
could found such a colony as his thought presaged: the other perished
on the scaffold, though not before he had sowed the seed of an American
empire. For Raleigh was the first to teach that agriculture, not mines,
is the true basis of a colony. In itself his colony on Roanoke Island
was a failure, but the idea of Roanoke was Raleigh's greatest legacy to
the English race.

With the dawn of the seventeenth century events came thick and fast. It
was a time when the maritime states of Western Europe were all keenly
interested in America, without having any clear idea of the problem.
Raleigh, the one man who had a grasp of the situation, entered upon
his tragic imprisonment in the same year that Champlain made his first
voyage to the St Lawrence. But while thought was confused and policy
unsettled, action could no longer be postponed. The one fact which
England, France, and Holland could not neglect was that to the north of
Florida no European colony existed on the American coast. Urging each of
these states to establish settlements in a tract so vast and untenanted
was the double desire to possess and to prevent one's neighbour from
possessing. On the other hand, caution raised doubts as to the balance
of cost and gain. The governments were ready to accept the glory and
advantage, if private persons were prepared to take the risk. Individual
speculators, very conscious of the risk, demanded a monopoly of trade
before agreeing to plant a colony. But this caused new difficulty. The
moment a monopoly was granted, unlicensed traders raised an outcry and
upbraided the government for injustice.

Such were the problems upon the successful or unsuccessful solution of
which depended enormous national interests, and each country faced them
according to its institutions, rulers, and racial genius. It only needs
a table of events to show how fully the English, the French, and the
Dutch realized that something must be done. In 1600 Pierre Chauvin
landed sixteen French colonists at Tadoussac. On his return in 1601
he found that they had taken refuge with the Indians. In 1602 Gosnold,
sailing from Falmouth, skirted the coast of Norumbega from Casco Bay to
Cuttyhunk. In 1603 the ships of De Chastes, with Champlain a