of this influx the manufacturers and merchants of England through various operations gathered in their full share. A frenzy for traffic animated all classes in England; the love of money and the trading spirit "permeated all departments of life and influenced almost every sentiment."
No wonder; as the possession of land gave dignity and power to the older aristocracy, so the possession of houses, factories, and shops gave strength and independence to the new middle class. For the men it opened the way to a position of influence in the affairs of state; to their wives and daughters it gave security, an easier life, an enlarged opportunity to acquire property and enter trade themselves. At the opening of the seventeenth century, the very air was charged with schemes for growing rich in a thousand ventures connected with the commerce and settlements of expanding England.
Living close together in the towns, the mercantile classes early acquired the habit of coöperation whenever capital beyond the reach of a single individual was required. Taking their cue perhaps from old merchant guilds, they learned how to unite their accumulations and their ingenuity in great corporations or companies chartered by the Crown to trade and plant colonies. In the reign of Elizabeth they formed the English Levant Company, which seized a share of the commerce with the East that had been monopolized by the Italians; when, in 1587, the last of the Venetian argosies, as if to celebrate the awful ruin of the Adriatic Queen, foundered in a storm off the Needles on its way to the London market, English capitalists were ready to carry forward the business on their own account. Another corporation, the Muscovy Company, pushed its traffic into Russia, reaching through the river systems of that country far southward into Persia. A third concern, the East India Company, created in 1600, sent its agents over the route opened by Vasco da Gama a hundred years before and founded, on the banks of the Ganges, the trading posts that expanded into the British dominion.
