United States or Montserrat ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Great achievements in Spain and in Europe increased their authority and power by the prestige of success. Finally, the discoveries, conquests, and colonization of America gave a unique position to the rulers of these distant possessions.

In their scheme of colonization in this Western World, first and last, the invitation was to all classes of Christians in suffering and persecution for conscience' sake, who were favorable to a free state where they could have the free enjoyment of their property and religion, to cast in their lot.

In a way, all of the colonizing movements, which we have been at pains to trace, might be regarded as the first and greatest result of the Commercial Revolution that is, if by the Commercial Revolution one understands simply the discovery of new trade-routes; but, as it is difficult to separate explorations from colonization, we have used the term "Commercial Revolution" to include both.

The letters commended and generously accepted this noble work of colonization, "which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian religion to such people as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of all true knowledge and worship of God, and may in time bring the infidels and savages living in those parts to human civility and to a settled and quiet government."

"Well, I figured that eventually I would have to foreclose on old Don Miguel Farrel, and it would require approximately two years after that before my irrigation system would be completed and the valley lands ready for colonization.

Other criticisms were numerous. Criticism of the American Colonization Society was prompted by a variety of motives; but the organization made itself vulnerable at many points. The movement attracted extraordinary attention, but has had practically no effect whatever on the position of the Negro in the United States.

There are the Cape Coast Castle, Acera, Fernando Po, and other small African settlements besides, which cannot cost less, in military occupation, than some few thousands a-year, say only £.10,000, all for foreign trade, since colonization and production are nil; and with Sierra Leone, they are only kept, or were established, for the purpose of suppressing the trade in slaves, and promoting a foreign trade in that quarter of Africa.

I have known men of an active, energetic, contented disposition, with a good flow of animal spirits, who had been bred in luxury and refinement, succeed better than men bred as farmers who were always hankering after bread and beer, and market ordinaries of Old England... To be dreaming when you should be looking after your cattle is a terrible drawback... There are certain persons who, too lazy and too extravagant to succeed in Europe, sail for Australia under the idea that fortunes are to be made there by a sort of legerdemain, spend or lose their capital in a very short space of time, and return to England to abuse the place, the people, and everything connected with colonization.

So, in the case of aviation, man was long convinced, for no scientific reason, that flight was possible. With the first ascent by balloon came the imagined mastery of the air; later, the invention of flight that can be controlled at will. To-day we are still in the stage of colonization. The future resources of the air remain hidden from our view.

The proprietary feudal grant was destined to play its part in the colonization of America, but the resplendent vision of Gilbert did not survive the reign of Elizabeth. Raleigh was the last of the great Elizabethan adventurers, and with the accession of the pedantic James I the New World was beginning to be regarded in the dry light of a commercial opportunity.