realm. Twice from his own purse thus recruited and once with the help of merchant capitalists, he attempted to establish a permanent agricultural settlement in America, not overlooking the possibility of finding precious metals.
Misfortune of every kind dogged the steps of his adventure, however, and at last, broken in estate, Raleigh was compelled to accept the verdict of failure. The empire of which he dreamed was to be built by other hands in other ways. The treasuries of gold which his captains sought were not to be found until, in the sweat of their brow, American colonists had cut and tramped their way across three thousand miles of forest, plain, desert, and mountain to the far end of the continent. Instead of precious metals Raleigh's men discovered a more secure foundation for a state had they but known it—the lowly tobacco leaf and the humble potato. The pungent weed was to furnish a currency no less certain than gold and afford the staple crop for baronial estates where wealth and leisure nourished a governing class capable of waging to a victorious end a dramatic contest with the descendants of the Raleighs, Leicesters, and Burleighs of the Elizabethan age. The plain prose of economy in the long run is stranger than the romance of fiction.
§
Though Raleigh failed, his experiments taught valuable lessons and his spirit fired contemporaries with emulative desire. If nothing more, he had proved that successful colonization was, in the beginning at least, beyond the strength and resources of any individual. The amount of capital and the diversity of talent demanded made it of necessity a coöperative undertaking, at all events until the first difficulties were resolved and the path was blazed. Thus it came about that the earliest permanent settlements were made by commercial corporations.
Four American colonies owed their inception to trading
