=252. Peculiar character of the English colonies.=—It is to the continent of America that we must turn for the field outside of Europe that in its performances and in its promises offered most to English commerce. After the early period of exploration, treasure-hunting, and piracy, English colonization in America developed in a form entirely its own. Emigrants went out, not to seek gold mines or to establish trading stations, but to found homes. Emigration was not so much a government policy as a popular movement, that attracted some of the best stock of English blood. There were great differences between the people of the different colonies on the Atlantic coast, as every student of American history knows, and there was again a difference between the colonies in the South and those on the islands. But in general it may be said that no European country could vie with England in the commercial quality of its colonial population. Certainly none could rival England in the quantity of colonists of European stock. The first census of the United States in 1790 showed a population (nearly four million), merely in this group of former English colonies, amounting to nearly half that in England and Wales. =253. Resources and industries of the colonies in America.=—Though the personal qualities of the English were duplicated on the other side of the Atlantic, the physical environment was absolutely different. Products of the field, the forest, and the sea, which were eagerly desired and hard to get in England, were to be had in abundance in the New World. The conditions for manufacture, on the other hand, were unfavorable; capital and labor found such an attractive field in the extractive industries (the production of raw material), that there was little temptation for the colonies to engage in the finishing of goods. In the plantation colonies of the South and the islands almost nothing was manufactured. Even in the center and North, where the difficulties of life and the talents of the people made manufacture more practicable, most industries were of a household character, rough clothing and implements being made in the spare hours at home; or were ordinary village trades,—milling, tanning, etc. All the fine manufactures were bought from England with raw or semi-raw products.