assert that there was an imminent prospect “that the number and infiniteness of the people will outgrow the matter whereon they worke for their life and sustentation, and shall one infest and become a burthen to another.”[1] The overflowing population was compared to blood that was too great in quantity to be held in the walls of the veins,[2] or to swarms of young bees in the month of June.[3] The suggestion of Sir George Peckham and Christopher Carlile with reference to making America a refuge for the unemployed poor, found hearty approval among the supporters of the Virginian enterprise. Dale expressed the prevailing sentiment of the Company, when he stated in his letter to Secretary Winwood, written in 1616, that Virginia was an admirable country for the “emptying of the full body” of England.[4] The Colony did not realize the hopes of its founders in this respect. The population of England continued to increase without any substantial diminution of the extreme poverty among the lower
- ↑ Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 340. The author of Nova Britannia wrote: “Unless we take measures to found new colonies, the earth will not suffice to sustain the overwhelming number of human beings.” Rev. William Crashaw, in the celebrated sermon which he preached before Lord Delaware and the Council for Virginia in London in February, 1609 (O. S.), declared that the colonization of the territory along the Powhatan would “rectifie and reform” many disorders in England, which “in this mightie and populous state are scarce possibly to be reformed without evacuation.” Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 368. Velasco, the Spanish ambassador in London, went so far in 1611 as to say in a communication to his sovereign, that the principal reason influencing the English in their settlement of Virginia was, that the Colony “would give an outlet to so many idle and wretched people as they have in England, and thus to prevent the dangers that may be feared from them.” Ibid., p. 456. See also letter of Gondomar to Philip III, Ibid., p. 681.
- ↑ Copeland’s Sermon, Neill’s English Colonization of America, p. 157.
- ↑ Virginia Britannia, Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 288.
- ↑ Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 783.
