§ 1. ENGLAND A COMMERCIAL POWER—In glancing over the progress of foreign trade in the time of Elizabeth, we noticed that our war with Spain was due to commercial as well as religious causes. The opening up of the New World made a struggle for power in the West almost inevitable among European nations; the new route to India _viâ_ the Cape of Good Hope, discovered by Vasco da Gama, made another struggle for commercial supremacy as inevitable in the far East. In the reign of Henry VIII. we find, from one of his Statutes, that Malaga had been {122} the farthest port to which at this time English seamen yet ventured. For a century or more after the discoveries of Columbus and da Gama, Spain and Portugal, and a little later on Holland, had practically a monopoly both of the Eastern and Western trade. But now a change had come. The Englishmen of the Elizabethan age cast off their fear of Spain, entered into rivalry with Holland, and finally made England the supreme commercial power of the modern world. The history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a continuous record of their struggles to attain this object. § 2. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE STRUGGLE WITH SPAIN—In the last quarter of the sixteenth century Elizabeth had entered (1579) into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Holland against Spain. The motive of the alliance was partly religious, but the shrewdness of the queen and her statesmen no doubt foresaw more than spiritual advantages to be gained thereby. After the alliance, Drake and the other great naval captains of that day began a system of buccaneering annoyances to Spanish commerce. The Spanish and Portuguese trade and factories in the East were considered the lawful prizes of the English and their allies the Dutch. The latter, as all know, were more successful at first than we were, and soon established an Oriental Empire in the Indian Archipelago. But at the very end of her reign England had prospered sufficiently for Elizabeth to grant charters to the Levant Company, and its far greater companion the East India Company. Then, when a fresh war with Spain was imminent, England wisely began to plant colonies in North America, at the suggestion of Sir Walter Raleigh; and after one or two other abortive attempts, Virginia was successfully founded by the London Company in 1609, and became a Crown colony in 1624. {123} After this, as every one knows, colonies grew rapidly on the strip of coast between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the East India Company was slowly gaining ground, and founding English agencies or “factories,” that of Surat (in 1612) being the most important. As yet we had not come into open conflict with Spain or Portugal; and indeed we owed the possession of Bombay to the marriage of Charles II. with Katherine of Braganza (1661). Then the company gained from Charles II. the important privilege of making peace or war on their own account. It had a good