THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 7 
called adventurers across the ocean. The hope of 
finding treasures of gold, wrote Adam Smith in ‘ The 
Wealth of Nations,” was the sole motive which 
inspired the Spanish conquest of America, and the 
search for new gold mines he denounced as a ruin- 
ous proceeding, leading in most cases to bankruptcy. 
Speaking in November 1855 to a working men’s 
audience on the subject of ‘Our Colonies,” Mr. 
Gladstone gave love of gold as the initial motive of 
modern colonisation ; the false idea that gold was to 
be found in immense quantities in North America, he 
said, did a work which the true idea never could have 
done, and the very delusion was made an instrument 
in the hands of Providence for forwatding the peopling 
of the vast spaces of America.2 A vain hope of gold 
in a stone which was brought back from Martin 
Frobisher’s first voyage to the Atzctic regions gave a 
great and immediate though wholly baseless impetus to 
two further voyages. Raleigh, after fruitless attempts 
to found colonies on more or less sound lines, was in 
his later days carried away to search for a mythical 
golden city. All down the centuries the lure of gold 
has gone on, though in modern times it has not been 
so much thesearch for gold in unknownand unexplored 
regions, as the lute of gold, where substantial finds of 
gold have already actually been made. Ballarat and 
Kalgoorlie, Klondike, and the Rand bear witness to 
! Book IV, chap. vii, Part I. 
* Address to members of the Mechanics’ Institute at Chester, 
November 12, 1855, on ‘Our Colonies,” printed in Gladstone and 
Britain's Imperial Policy, by Paul Knaplund, Ph.D., Assistant Professor 
of History in the University of Wisconsin (George Allen & Unwin, 
Ltd.,1927), see pp. 191-2.