employment would not only be created for a great number of men who passed their time in idleness, and were burdensome to the community in which they lived, but also for children under fourteen years of age, and for women who had no honorable means of support. The men might be engaged in working mines and in cultivating the fields, and the women in gathering cotton and spinning hemp. The attention of the children could be directed to a thousand different tasks.[1] Christopher Carlile expressed similar views. The people, he said, in consequence of the long peace, had increased so much, that a large number were brought up in the homes of their parents without any instruction as to how to earn a livelihood when those parents died. They were often driven into disorders and led on from one shameful end to another. With the opportunities of a new country thrown open to them, not only was it probable that they would refrain from falling into evil courses, but also that they would become prosperous and rise to honor and distinction.[2]
In the light of the present dense population of England, it seems remarkable that the number of its inhabitants in the sixteenth century should have been considered too great for safety. To overcrowding were attributed the terrible plagues that created so much havoc in that age.[3] The same dangerous condition was thought to exist in the early part of the seventeenth century. The authors of the True and Sincere Declaration, issued in 1609,
- ↑ Hakluyt’s Voyages, vol. III, p. 219. The term used is “gathering Cotton.”
- ↑ Ibid., vol. III, p. 232.
- ↑ Virginia Council and Company to Lord Mayor of London, Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 252. The expression used is: “A swarme of unnecessary inmates as a contynual cause of dearth and famine and the very originell cause of all the plagues.”
