ia
haunted by us, may in short space and for little or nothinge, in a
manner be had in that part of America which lieth betweene 30 and 60
degrees of northerly latitude."

Little wonder that the New World of America, thus portrayed in
heightened colors, proved attractive to gentlemen adventurers dreaming
of personal dominion, to merchants intent upon profit, or to kings
seeking revenue and prestige. The colonizing activities of the time were
but incidental to the larger movement of commercial expansion and the
extension of political power. The founding of the East India Company in
1600 and of the Virginia Company in 1609 were but two expressions of the
same purpose: America was but one of the two Indies whose exploitation
would redound at once to private advantage and to national welfare. That
the individual and the state had a common and inseparable interest in
the expansion of commerce and the settlement of colonies is, indeed, one
of the most characteristic and significant ideas of the time:
characteristic, since it pervades the literature of the period;
significant, because it is an index of those profound political and
economic influences that were transforming the old into the new Europe.

For at the opening of the seventeenth century the old order was fast
disappearing. The ideal of a single Christian community, so long
symbolized by the Holy Roman Empire and the Holy Catholic Church, was
losing its hold upon the minds of men as the result of the
differentiation of European culture on lines of racial or national
distinction. In politics this movement was embodied in the rise of the
centralized national state; and the sixteenth century ushered in the era
of international wars, of which the struggle between Elizabeth and
Philip II was one, and one of the most important. When such conflicts
were always impending, it was essential that the resources of the nation
should be at the disposal of the Government. The national state could,
therefore, neither share authority with the Pope at Rome, nor endure
independent feudal or municipal jurisdictions within the realm; and in
its military and administrative organization, feudal officers, since the
thirteenth century in France and England, had been steadily replaced by
paid agents appointed by the king, whose hostility to the Pope was
chiefly inspired by the desire to secure from the Church the money
necessary to maintain them. A well-filled treasury was thus the first
ne