nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America which lieth
between 30 and 60 degrees of northerly latitude_."

Even after repeated expeditions had discounted the exuberant optimism
of this description, the Englishmen's faith did not wane. While for
many years there lurked in the mind of the Londoner, the hope that
some of the products of the Levant might be raised in the fertile
valleys of Virginia, the practical English temperament none the less
began promptly to appease itself with the products of the vast
forests, the masts, the tar and pitch, the furs; with the fish from
the coast waters, the abundant cod, herring, and mackerel; nor was it
many years before tobacco, indigo, sugar, cotton, maize, and other
commodities brought to the merchants of England a great American
commerce.

The first attempts to found colonies in the country by Sir Humphrey
Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were pitiable failures. But the
settlement on the James in 1607 marked the beginning of a nation. What
sort of nation? What race of people? Sir Walter Raleigh, with true
English tenacity, had said after learning of the collapse of his own
colony, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation." The new nation
certainly was English in its foundation, whatever may be said of its
superstructure. Virginia, New England, Maryland, the Carolinas, New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia were begun by Englishmen; and New
England, Virginia, and Maryland remained almost entirely English
throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. These
colonies reproduced, in so far as their strange and wild surroundings
permitted, the towns, the estates, and the homes of Englishmen of that
day. They were organized and governed by Englishmen under English
customs and laws; and the Englishman's constitutional liberties were