the western continent were brought to the attention of the merchants of Amsterdam by the voyage of Henry Hudson. Commissioned by the Dutch government (1609) to seek out the ever desired Northwest Passage, he came upon a wonderful harbor and a river, up which he sailed one hundred

and fifty miles before coming upon shoal water. The Indians proved friendly and were ready to exchange valuable furs for the merest baubles. A trading ship was immediately fitted out, and in good time she returned with a profitable cargo. A fortified trading post was built on Castle Island just below Albany, another on Manhattan at the mouth of

C

the river, and a third on the Delaware. In 1621 the West India Company was chartered with full authority to plant. colonies in New Netherlands. Monopoly of the commerce with the West Indies, Africa, and the American coast was bestowed. The Company's trading posts gave access to rich hunting grounds, and a brisk commerce in furs developed. Soon an annual harvest of sixty-six thousand skins was sent over to the furriers of fashionable Europe. Other opportunities of wealth were improved by the doughty Dutchmen. The treasure ships of Spain were lawful booty, and slaves bought on the Gold Coast of Africa might be sold in the West Indies for many times their purchase price.

The West India Company grew rich apace, but their colonies did not prosper. There were not enough genuine settlers. The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were mere servants of the Company. The agricultural communities along the Hudson, made up of feudal dependents of the "patroons," were discontented and eager to change masters. Holland's New World possessions were far more promising than England's, not for commerce only, but for agriculture and manufactures as well. The Dutch settlers had a more genial climate and a more fertile soil than their neighbors to the eastward. Their forests furnished the best of timber, and their rivers afforded unexcelled water power; but industry languished when the fruits of labor, the surplus products of field and loom and mill, were claimed by the over-lord to whom the home government had given the land. The fact that the States-General sent them governors and garrisons did not much signify when the opportunity for acquiring land and fortune was withheld. Loyalty waned as men learned how the English villages throve under freer laws. So it came about that when England, jealous of the commercial ascendency of Holland, sent a fleet to capture her trading posts in America, there was no serious resistance. The Dutch governor was obliged to surrender New Amsterdam (1664) without firing a gun in its defense. Immediately settlers began to pour in from the English colonies north and south and from over sea. The population of New

Netherlands at the time of the conquest was seventy-five hundred. It had doubled by 1696. The Swedish settlements along the Delaware succumbed as readily to English influence. Thus did Great Britain acquire title to the Atlantic coast from the St. Croix to the St. Marys River. The Final Victory of the English. Once rooted in a Bancroft, soil unquestionably their own, the British colonies grew with amazing rapidity. At the close of the seventeenth States, century there were two hundred and sixty thousand of the IV, 128-130. king's subjects in America. Fifty years more saw the num

ber rise to one million souls. The first United States census
(1790) recorded a population of three million nine hundred
and twenty-nine thousand persons of European descent.
Fully one fifth of these people spoke some other language
than English. Probably not more than half were of Anglo-
Saxon blood. There were Dutch communities along the
Hudson, German in Pennsylvania, Swedish along the Dela-
ware, Italians and Salzburgers and French in Georgia; Hu-
guenot refugees were numerous in the coast towns, notably
Boston, New York, and Charleston; but everywhere the
dominant element was of English extraction.
This extraordinary migration was largely due to social
and industrial conditions in the British Isles. The religious
and political tyranny of the Commonwealth, no less than
that of the Stuarts, drove thinking men to seek opportunity
to work out their own convictions in a land where there was
neither priest nor king. The agricultural revolution conse-
quent on the conversion of tilled lands into sheep pasture,
threw thousands of men out of employment. The peasant
farmers lost their holdings, the agricultural laborers were no
longer needed. Seventeenth century England was a good
place to emigrate from. The surplus population turned to
the New World, where land was to be had for the asking.
Most of the men who crossed the Atlantic in English vessels
were not priests, soldiers, trappers, gold seekers, but men
bred to the cultivation of the soil. They brought their wives
and children with them and purposed to found homes in
America. They had sober ideas concerning the necessity

Hist. of
United

of earning their bread by hard work. The land open to English settlement contained no hoards of gold and silver, but it proved to have sources of wealth no less remunerative in the long run. Fur-bearing animals were abundant. Forests of pine and oak yielded products that brought a good price in Old World markets. The sea teemed with edible fish, oysters, and lobsters. Captain John Smith, who explored the New England coast in 1614 and wrote a rosecolored account of its possibilities, prophesied, and truly, that the cod fisheries of the north Atlantic would profit this country more than the best mines the king of Spain possessed. Soil and climate were suited to the growing of familiar European cereals, and new products, such as maize, potatoes, and tobacco, were destined to become a prolific source of wealth.

Four European nations laid claim to the territory now included in the United States. Each attempted to secure its title by planting colonies and providing for military defense. We have seen how Holland lost New Netherlands through failure to plant free agricultural colonies. France made strenuous effort to hold her New World territory, calling in the Indians to defend her sparsely peopled outposts. In 1763 she was forced to surrender her claim to the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley. In 1803 Louisiana Territory passed into the possession of the United States. Spain had even slighter hold on the lands north of the Gulf of Mexico. No permanent settlements had been made between St. Augustine and Santa Fé. Missions had been built in plenty and the native races were converted to the Catholic church, but not to European civilization. Spanish adventurers had not patience to undertake the development of a region so barren of immediate gain. By a series of treaties the United States has secured this part of Spain's New World empire- the Floridas in 1819, Texas in 1845, New Mexico, Arizona, and California in 1848. The English race, the last upon the scene, with apparently the most unpromising field for colonial enterprise, was destined to occupy the whole land from the

Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. Even the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the Isthmus of Panama, and the Spanish Main have finally come under our control. The Oriental empire, discovered by Magellan and maintained by priests and soldiers for near four hundred years, toppled at a blow. Spain has been obliged at last to surrender the Philippines to her vigorous rival.

LA SALLE'S SHIP, "THE GRIFFIN"