so RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE
A writer on trade, who died in 1681, at the time
when Penn received his patent, Samuel Fortrey, a
French Protestant refugee, contended that © to increase
the people of this nation permission should be given
to all people of foreign countries, under such restric-
tions as the State should think fit, freely to inhabit and
reside within this kingdom,’ and that the Protestant
religion of England would be an inducement to immi-
grants. Any exodus from England would thus be
made good by immigration into England. But
Fortrey, like almost all the writers of this period,
looked on colonies in the light of trade. I conceive
no foreign plantation should be undertaken, or
prosecuted, but in such countries that may increase
the wealth and trade of this nation.” A later writer,
Charles Davenant, taking up the same objection, that
the colonies drained the kingdom of its people, gave
the same answer, that emigration should be balanced
by immigration, that England should be made ¢ the
Azilum for all oppressed and afflicted persons.’? A
man of a very different stamp from Penn, Sir Josiah
Child, the well-known autocrat of the East India
Company, shared Penn’s view that emigration to the
colonies had not weakened and depeopled England.
He argued that, if there had been no plantations, the
kind of people who emigrated would have gone
abroad in any case, that. since the plantations had come
Y England's Interest and Improvement considered in the Increase of the
Trade of this Kingdom, first published in 1663, fourth edition 1744,
pp. 4 and 4o.
* Discourses on the Public Revenues and on the Trade of England, which
more immediately treat of the Foreign Traffic of this Kingdom, Part II,
Discourse 111, On the Plantation Trade (1 698), p. 202.