Full text: Religion, colonising & trade

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.
	        
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