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.