THE CODFISH FRONTIER 275 



their vast undeveloped resources at sea and in farms and 

 forests to receive the sudden flood of migration from Europe 

 that presently began. In addition, the free spirit of Protestant- 

 ism, independent by nature and linked with the growing 

 mercantile classes in England, had a great advantage over the 

 restricted, Catholic, state-controlled immigration policies of 

 the French in America. The great Ocean River slowly swirl- 

 ing from the west to make its rounds of the Atlantic world 

 was now surrounded not only by the active civilization of 

 seaboard Europe, but by a new and tremendously vital trans- 

 portation of Europeans all along the western boundaries of 

 the Gulf Stream. This fresh development guaranteed a new 

 lease of life to western Christian civilization as an Atlantic 

 common culture — much as the Mediterranean had fostered 

 the older parent culture of classical and medieval times. By 

 1700 the Atlantic world of today was coming iiito being 

 around the full circle of the beneficent waters of the Ocean 

 River. 



