companies—two of English origin, a third under Dutch-Walloon patronage, and a fourth under Swedish direction. It was the London Company chartered in 1606 that led the way by founding Virginia; it was the Massachusetts Bay Company incorporated in 1629 that saved the little Plymouth fellowship from destruction and started New England on its course. In a fierce quest for trade, the Dutch West India Company, established in 1621, laid in New Netherland the basis of a colony upon which the English forty-three years later erected the province of New York. Not to be outdone by Holland and England, the king of Sweden called into being a West India Company of his own and commissioned it to break ground for a Swedish state on the banks of the Delaware.
In a certain sense Georgia may also be included among the "Company" colonies. If the avowed purpose of its principal promoter, James Oglethorpe, was philanthropic—the establishment of an asylum for poor debtors—the legal instrument for the realization of that design was a charter granted by George II in 1732, uniting the sponsors of the enterprise in "one body politic and corporate," known as the "Trustees for establishing the colony of Georgia in America." In form of government and in methods of financing, the Georgia concern did not differ materially from the trading Company. So it may be said that the corporation of capitalists—the instrument employed in commercial undertakings—was the agency which planted the first successful colonies and molded their early polity in church and state and economy.
Now the commercial corporation for colonization, whether it sprang from the sole motive of profit-making or from mixed incentives, such as the prosecution of trade and the spread of religious propaganda, was in reality a kind of autonomous state. Like the state, it could endure indefinitely as long as its charter lasted; its members might die but, by the continuous election of successors, the corporation went on. Like the state, it had a constitution, a
