says Shakespeare, 'is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.' Of a very mingled yarn is the web of which colonial effort is woven.

The intellectual desire to know more about the world than is possible to one who is content to pass his life in his native district or land is commonly stimulated, in the Greed of first place, by the hope of improving one's mate- gain. rial condition, by the expectation of making more money than were likely otherwise. Evil lurks in this expectation; it easily degenerates into greed of gain, into the passion for gold.

The desire for foreign exploration, too, is invigorated by impatience of that restraint which law or custom imposes on an old country, by the hope of greater liberty Passion for and personal independence. This hope may tempt liberty. to moral ruin; it may issue in the practice of licentious lawlessness.

Then there emerges a third motive the love of mastery, the love of exercising authority over peoples of inferior civilisation or physical development. The love of mastery is capable alike of benefiting and of injuring hu- Love of manity. If it be exercised prudently, it may mastery. serve to bring races, which would otherwise be excluded, within the pale of a higher civilisation; but if it be exercised imprudently, it sinks to tyranny and cruelty.

The passion for mastery, the passion for gold, and the passion for freedom, have all stimulated colonising energy with mingled results. When the three passions are restrained by the moral sense, colonising energy works for the world's advantage; the good preponderates. Wherever the moral sense proves too weak to control the three perilous passions, colonising energy connotes much moral and physical evil.

II

Great colonising effort, which has its primary source in intellectual curiosity, is an invariable characteristic of eras like the era of the Renaissance, when man's intellect is

Great colonising epochs.

working, whether for good or ill, with exceptional energy. The Greeks and Romans were great colonisers at the most enlightened epochs of their history. In modern Europe voyages of discovery were made by sailors of the Italian Republics, of the Spanish peninsula, and of France, when the spirit of the Renaissance was winging amongst them its highest flight.

At first the maritime explorers of Southern Europe confined their efforts to the coast of Africa, especially to the

The
Western
Hemi-

west coast. Then they passed to the East-to India, at first by way of the Red Sea, and aftersphere. wards round the Cape of Good Hope, and through the Indian Ocean. Nothing yet was known of the Western Hemisphere. It was a sanguine hope of reaching India by a new and direct route through western seas that led to the great discovery of the Continent of America.

Columbus, its discoverer, was a native of the Italian Republic of Genoa, a city distinguished by the feverish energy Iwith which its inhabitants welcomed new ideas that were likely to increase men's material prosperity. It was in August 1492-when sailing under the patronage of the greatest sovereigns that filled the throne of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, on what he believed would prove a new route to the Indies-that Columbus struck land in what he called, and in what we still call, the West Indies. He made two voyages to the West

Columbus's discovery, 1492.

Indies before he passed further west and touched the mainland, which turned out to be South America.

England, under the intellectual stimulus of the Renaissance, was not behind Spain in the exploration of the Western Seas. Colonial expansion loomed on Eng- England

and the

New

World.

land's horizon when the English Renaissance was coming to birth at the end of the fifteenth century. Like Spain, England owed its first glimpse of the New World to the courage of an Italian sailor.

At the time that Columbus sighted South America, John Cabot, also a native of energetic Genoa, had been long settled at Bristol in England, and was now a pilot of that port. No sooner had Columbus sighted South America than Cabot sighted North America. Columbus and Cabot flourished at the end of the fifteenth century-in Sir Thomas More's youth. The work which they inaugurated was steadily carried forward throughout the sixteenth century, and its progress was watched with a restless ecstasy.

North and

America.

2

The division of labour in exploring the new continent, which was faintly indicated by the two directions which Cabot and Columbus took respectively to North and South, was broadly adopted in the century South that followed by sailors starting respectively from English and Spanish ports. Spaniards continued to push forward their explorations in South America, or in the extreme south of the northern continent. Englishmen by no means left South America undisturbed, but they won their greatest victories for the future in the northern division of the new continent. Spain and England were throughout the six- ? teenth century strenuous rivals as colonisers of the Western Hemisphere. In the end, South America became for the most part a Spanish settlement; North America became for the most part an English settlement.

America and new ideals.

The knowledge that a New World was opening to the Old, proved from the first a sharper spur to the imagination in England than in any country of Europe. It contributed there, more notably than elsewhere, to the formation among enlightened men of a new ideal of life; it gave birth to the notion that humanity had it in its power to begin at will existence afresh, could free itself in due season from the imperfections of the Old World. Within very few years of the discovery of America, Sir Thomas More described, as we have seen, that ideal state which he located in the new hemisphere, that ideal state upon which he bestowed the new name of 'Utopia.' Sir Thomas More's romance of Utopia is not merely a literary masterpiece; it is also a convincing testimony to the stirring effects on English genius of the discovery of an unknown, an untrodden world.

But the discovery of America brought of necessity in its train to England, no less than to other countries, the less elevated sentiments which always dog the advances of exploration. The spirit of English exploration was not for long

Materialistic influences.

uncoloured by greed of gain. Licence and oppression darkened its development. But the vague immensity of the opportunities opened by the sudden expansion of the earthly planet filled Englishmen with a 'wild surmise' which, if it could not kill, could check the growth of active evil. England's colonial aspirations of the sixteenth century never wholly lost their first savour of idealism.

The spirit

In Elizabethan England a touch of philosophy tinged the spirit of adventure through all ranks of the nation. Men were ambitious, Shakespeare tells us, to see the wonders of the world abroad in order to enlarge their mental horizons. They lavished their fortunes and their energies in discovering islands far away, in

of

adventure.

the interests of truth. The intellectual stir which moved his being impelled Sir Philip Sidney, the finest type of the many-sided culture of the day, to organise colonial exploration, although he died too young to engage in it actively. The unrest which drove men to cross the ocean and seek settlement in territory that no European foot had trodden was identified with resplendent virtue. Such was the burden of Drayton's ode 'To the Virginian Voyage' :

'You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honour still pursue,
Whilst loitering hinds

Lurk here at home with shame,

Go, and subdue.

Britons, you stay too long;

Quickly aboard bestow you,
And with a merry gale

Swell your stretched sail,

With vows as strong

As the winds that blow you.'

Englishmen of mettle were expected to seek at all hazards earth's paradise in America. Not only was the New World credited with unprecedented fertility, but the laws of nature were believed to keep alive there a golden age in perpetuity. These fine aspirations were never wholly extinguished, although there lurked behind them the hope that an age of gold in a more material and literal sense than philosophers conceived it might ultimately reward the adventurers. The Elizabethans were worldlyminded enough to judge idealism alone an unsafe foundation on which to rear a colonial empire. For I am not so simple,' said an early advocate of colonial enterprise who fully recognised in idealism a practical safeguard against its

Imaginary
age
Gold.

of