48 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE
curiously misread history when he pitched upon the
reign of Charles II as a golden age for planting English
freedom overseas. There were some too who, with
no love for the navigation acts, and with strong
leanings to free trade, nevertheless contended that
plantations cartied off Englishmen who were wanted
for trade. Roger Coke held that * the trade of England,
and the fishing trade, are so much diminished by how
much they might have been supplied by those men
who ate diverted in our American plantations’; that
the peopling of the plantations and the tepeopling of
Ireland had drained England, and that attempts at
further discovery of new plantations were to be
deprecated as well as the project of peopling Carolina.l
The verdict of ¢ Britannia Languens ’ on the subject in
1680 was a very wholesale condemnation of colonisa-
tion. ‘These plantations may be considered as the
true grounds and causes of all our present mischiefs ;
for, had our fishers been put on no other employment,
had those millions of people which we have lost or
been prevented of by the plantations continued in
England, the government would long since have
been under a necessity of easing and regulating our
trade.” 2
Opposed to this docttine that the colonies had
disastrously drained England of her population was a
treatise on ‘ The Benefit of Plantations or Colonies,’
by William Penn. ¢ Colonies,” he wrote, ‘are the
seeds of nations, begun and nourished by the cate of
1 Roger Coke, u? sup. : A Discourse of Trade, in Two Parts (London,
1670) : Reasons of the Decay of the English Trade, pp. 7 and 10.
% Britannia Languens, ut sup., p. 176.