8 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
the attractive power of gold, to the peopling which is 
the immediate outcome of gold discoveries, to the far- 
reaching economic, social and political results which 
have followed in the train of gold. 
A wholly different motive, religion, was an 
immense force in favour of making a British Empire ; 
but it was a force which, in the case of the English in 
the sixteenth century, and to a large extent later also, 
operated mote by repulsion than by attraction. In 
the first chapter of his * Discourse concerning Western 
Planting,” Hakluyt, as is noted in Sir Walter Raleigh’s 
essay, tells of being challenged by papists as to how 
many infidels have been by us converted,” and © albeit 
I alleged the example of the ministers which were sent 
from Geneva with Villegagnon into Brazil, and those 
that went with John Ribault into Florida, as also those 
of our nation that went with Frobisher, Sir Francis 
Drake and Fenton; yet in very deed I was not able 
to name any one infidel by them converted.” This 
passage is followed by the shrewd remark that the 
clergy, if set to the work of conversion, would become 
less contentious.! Conversion of the heathen was in 
the forefront of Portuguese and Spanish expansion. 
It gave to their wars and conquests the character of 
crusades. To the English the crusading impulse was 
given by antipathy to the particular kind of Christian 
creed which Portuguese and Spaniards held. Yet 
conversion was one of the standard motives in the 
mouths of English advocates of empire in the sixteenth 
century. That Hakluyt, as a minister of the Church 
of England, should give a first place among motives 
1 Hakluyt, vol. xii, pp. 32-3.