In December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, below London, the Susan Constant, of one hundred tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the little pinnace Discovery, of but twenty tons--three puny ships to bear across the wintry Atlantic the beginners of a new nation. The setting forth of these argonauts produced much excitement in London. Patriotic feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers were offered for the success of the expedition, sermons appropriate to the occasion were preached, and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem by Michael Drayton. Even those who were too sober to indulge the vain expectations of gold mines and spice islands that filled the imaginations of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as Lord Bacon did later: "It is with the kingdoms on earth as it is with the kingdom of heaven: sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree. Who can tell?" On the 19th of that most tempestuous December the little fleet weighed anchor and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as one may nowadays see ships rush past Blackwall toward the sea. Never were men engaged in a great enterprise doomed to greater sorrows. From the time they left the Thames the ships were tossed and delayed by tempests, while the company aboard was rent by factious dissensions. II. [Sidenote: The laws and orders.] Those who shaped the destinies of the colony had left little undone that inventive stupidity could suggest to assure the failure of the enterprise. King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering in novel projects, had personally framed a code of unwise laws and orders. The supremacy of the sovereign and the interests of the Church were pedantically guarded, but the colony was left without any ruler with authority enough to maintain order. The private interest of the individual, the most available of all motives to industry, was merged in that of the commercial company to which Virginia had been granted. All the produce of the colony was to go into a common stock for five years, and the emigrants, men without families, were thrown into a semi-monastic trading community like the Hanseatic agencies of the time, with the saving element of a strong authority left out. Better devices for promoting indolence and aggravating the natural proneness to dissension of men in hard circumstances could scarcely have been hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the inevitable alternatives under such a communistic arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn. III. [Sidenote: Character of the emigrants.] [Sidenote: Smith's Gen. Hist., iii, c. i and c. xii.] [Sidenote: Advertisements for Planters of New Eng., p. 5.] [Sidenote: Comp. Briefe Declaration in Pub. Rec. Off., Sainsbury i, 66; and New Life of Va.] [Sidenote: Essay on Plantations.]