strong and self-supporting community. 'I shall yet live
to see it an English nation,' he wrote--at the very moment
when Champlain was first dreaming of the St Lawrence.
Coligny and Raleigh were both constructive statesmen.
The one was murdered before he could found such a colony
as his thought presaged: the other perished on the
scaffold, though not before he had sowed the seed of an
American empire. For Raleigh was the first to teach that
agriculture, not mines, is the true basis of a colony.
In itself his colony on Roanoke Island was a failure,
but the idea of Roanoke was Raleigh's greatest legacy to
the English race.

With the dawn of the seventeenth century events came
thick and fast. It was a time when the maritime states
of Western Europe were all keenly interested in America,
without having any clear idea of the problem. Raleigh,
the one man who had a grasp of the situation, entered
upon his tragic imprisonment in the same year that
Champlain made his first voyage to the St Lawrence. But
while thought was confused and policy unsettled, action
could no longer be postponed. The one fact which England,
France, and Holland could not neglect was that to the
north of Florida no European colony existed on the American
coast. Urging each of these states to establish settlements
in a tract so vast and untenanted was the double desire
to possess and to prevent one's neighbour from possessing.
On the other hand, caution raised doubts as to the balance
of cost and gain. The governments were ready to accept
the glory and advantage, if private persons were prepared