THE settlement of America by Englishmen in the seven-
teenth century was the first phase of that world-wide ex-
pansion of England which has continued for the past three
centuries. The men who founded the colonies were Eng-
lishmen, the incentives that impelled them to migrate were
English in their origin, and the forms of colonial life and gov-
ernment they set up were reproductions or modifications of
institutions already established and conditions already prevail-
ing in one way or another at home. The world of the colonies
in the seventeenth century was an English world. The first
duty, therefore, of him who would write of our colonial begin-
nings is to discover the place that each group of settlers occu-
pied in this great colonizing adventure and to determine the
exact character of the ideas and purposes of the founders in re-
lation to the similar ideas and purposes that were influencing
men at the same time in England. It is no part of his historical
task to study the colonies from the vantage ground of later
events or of the higher enlightenment of the present day in
order to find out, as has sometimes been done with too vivid an
imagination, the contribution that the men who settled the
colonies have made to the principles and practices of the great
Republic of today. Little that took place in America in the
seventeenth century can be construed as American, in any
proper sense of the word. To scrutinize that century for the
purpose of extracting therefrom something analogous to mod-
ern notions of liberty and progress is to disturb the whole his-
torical process and to run the risk of admitting prepossessions
that have already done much to mislead the popular mind as
to what the earliest period of English life on American soil
really means. An unbiased approach to the colonies from the
standpoint of their origin will do something to eliminate those

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