offered a desired opportunity. There were the men bitten with the
spirit of adventure, to whom the work of the pioneer presented an
irresistible attraction. Such men are always numerous in virile
communities, and when in any society their numbers begin to
diminish, its decay is at hand. The imperial activities of the
modern age have more than anything else kept the breed alive in
all European countries, and above all in Britain. To this type
belonged the conquistadores of Spain, the Elizabethan seamen, the
French explorers of North America, the daring Dutch navigators.
Again, there were the younger sons of good family for whom the
homeland presented small opportunities, but who found in colonial
settlements the chance of creating estates like those of their
fathers at home, and carried out with them bands of followers
drawn from among the sons of their fathers' tenantry. To this
class belonged most of the planter-settlers of Virginia, the
seigneurs of French Canada, the lords of the great Portuguese
feudal holdings in Brazil, and the dominant class in all the
Spanish colonies. Again, there were the 'undesirables' of whom the
home government wanted to be rid--convicts, paupers, political
prisoners; they were drafted out in great numbers to the new
lands, often as indentured servants, to endure servitude for a
period of years and then to be merged in the colonial population.
When the loss of the American colonies deprived Britain of her
dumping-ground for convicts, she had to find a new region in which
to dispose of them; and this led to the first settlement of
Australia, six years after the establishment of American
independence. Finally, in the age of bitter religious controversy
there was a constant stream of religious exiles seeking new homes
in which they could freely follow their own forms of worship. The
Puritan settlers of New England are the outstanding example of