Conditions surrounding Settlement of J'irginia 523 1621, 3,570; so that in the fifteen years in which Virginia was the only American colony there were altogether but few more than 5,000 emigrants from England thither. The devices that were proposed to secure colonists, some of which indeed were adopted, suggest the same paucity in the supply. In 161 1 Sir Thomas Dale, w-riting home to Lord Salisbury and appealing for a supply of 2,000 men, says that he has " conceived that if it will please his jNlajestie to banish hither all offenders condemned betwixt this and then to die, out of common Gaoles, and likewise so continue that grant for 3 yeres unto the Colonic, (and thus doth the Spaniard people his Indies,) it would be a readie way to furnish us with men."^ The company, as a matter of fact, followed this policy to a limited extent through the whole period of its existence, but at this time convict emigration played but a small part compared with the extent to which it was later carried.- Yet the company repeatedly asked the mayor of London for vagrant boys and girls of the city to be sent to the colony, and in 1621 had a bill introduced into Parliament which would have required each parish in England to send at its own expense a certain number of its paupers to Virginia.^ The most destructive forces that were keeping down population in England at this time were three : warfare, death penalties inflicted by the law, and pestilence. It is true that England was in 1607 at peace, and destined to remain so for the next seventeen years, but peace was recent and had been preceded by a long warlike period. The genera- tion that could be counted on for purposes of emigration was that which had been growing up in the past, and this could not be re- placed immediately. It is true also, as frequent experience has shown, that national warfare does not necessarily deplete population. But the warfare of Elizabeth's time was particularly destructive to life. The small body of English troops which according to the treaty of 1585 England bound herself to keep up in the Netherlands was like a leak in one of the Dutch dikes. Badly selected, badly equipped, badly fed, the soldiers died in Holland and Zealand almost faster than they could be recruited in England.* Those who w^ere in France in 1591 and the succeeding years were the victims of an only slightly less fatality ; those in Ireland perhaps of a greater. The naval expeditions were even more fatal than land campaigns. The sailors and soldiers on board the vessels returning from the ' Brown, Genesis of the United States, I. 506- -J. D. Butler in American Historical Review, II. 12-33. ^Records of the Virginia Company (1906), I. 270, 431, 479, 489, 583. etc.
- Leycester Correspondence, Camden Society, 167, 285, 338, 374, 384, 389,
etc. : Motley. United Netherlands, I., chap. vi.
