The trade with France had also declined greatly during the closing years of the Sixteenth century. Not only had the religious wars proved a tremendous obstacle, but the government at Paris discriminated against the woolens from England by means of custom duties, while the French workmen were themselves manufacturing cloth of excellent quality in larger amounts than had hitherto been thought possible. In the Low Countries the long and bitter struggle of the people against the bloody bands of Alva had wrought such destruction and had so ruined industry that all foreign commerce had greatly declined.[1-9]
There can be no surprise, then, that many English economists felt that a crisis had been reached, that nothing save the immediate establishment of colonies would prevent disaster. With the woolen industry declining, with the shipbuilding centres almost idle, with able mariners deserting the service, with the foreign market gradually closing to English wares, with the country overrun with idle and starving laborers, with some of her chief natural resources nearly exhausted and the trade by which her needs were replenished in constant danger, England turned to America as her hope for salvation. Upon securing a foothold in the New World, hitherto monopolized by Spain and Portugal, depended Albion's future greatness and prosperity.
It is this which gave to the London Company its national character, and made its efforts to establish a colony across the Atlantic a crusade, a movement in which every Englishman was vitally concerned. The great lords and wealthy merchants who comprised the Company knew well enough that there was little hope of immediate returns upon the money they subscribed so liberally. They expected to receive their reward in another way, in the revival of English industrial life and the restoration of English economic independence. It is a singular perversion of history, an inaccurate interpretation of men and events, which for so many years beclouded our conception of the beginning of the British colonial empire. The settlement at Jamestown was not the product of a selfish, private venture, but the fruition of long years of thought and endeavor, long years of pleading with the English public, of the conscious and deliberate efforts of the nation to expand to the New World, to break the bonds of economic dependence and to restore to England the place in the world which rightfully was hers.