2 STATEN ISLAND INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
willing to go were not generally fit, and those that were fit were 
not, as a rule, willing to go. 
We may surmise that very few of those that landed at James- 
town on that beautiful May day ever dreamed for a moment of 
spending their lives in a wild Indian land, or of building up a new 
country in the only way the wisdom of the world has ever discov- 
ered: by hard labor, resolution, constancy, common sense, common 
virtue, and common courage. 
The dare-devils, the ne’er-do-wells, the broken-down gentlemen, 
the soldiers of fortune, the adventurers without ties, without hope 
and quite as well without fear, served their day and generation 
very well indeed by risking their lives and losing them for the sake 
of the expedition. They set the fashion and made the way to 
Virginia familiar and commonplace after a while. 
The charters of 1606 and 1609 gave way to yet another in 1612, 
which transferred the government of the colony from the council 
to the company through the courts. 
These courts were quarterly meetings of the London Company, 
styled the four Great and General Courts of the Treasurer, Coun- 
cil, and Company of Adventurers of Virginia. 
These meetings in London were educating a great many people 
in the art of governing a state. James I would have been as- 
tounded if he could have seen how clear and keen and just were 
growing the conceptions of popular rights. 
And so it was by 1619 some progress had been made through a 
great deal of suffering in the colony, some of which was really 
unnecessary, undeserved, and not to be expected, but very little. 
Things were managed in such a way that for twelve years from 
1607 the only path to progress was over the miseries of the living 
and the bodies of the dead. The spent lives of the roving, the 
venturous, the unscrupulous, the drones, the devil-me-cares, were 
not altogether wasted even in these later days, cut short indeed as 
they were and all too soon. | 7 ) 
We owe some victories to the legions of the lost. 
