The desire
of a remedy for this supposed evil, and the wish to establish marts for
trade, led the governments often to undertake the establishment of
colonies as an affair of state expediency. Colonization and commerce,
indeed, would naturally become objects of interest to an ingenious and
enterprising people, inhabiting a territory closely circumscribed in its
limits, and in no small part mountainous and sterile; while the islands
of the adjacent seas, and the promontories and coasts of the neighboring
continents, by their mere proximity, strongly solicited the excited
spirit of emigration. Such was this proximity, in many instances, that
the new settlements appeared rather to be the mere extension of
population over contiguous territory, than the establishment of distant
colonies. In proportion as they were near to the parent state, they
would be under its authority, and partake of its fortunes. The colony at
Marseilles might perceive lightly, or not at all, the sway of Phocis;
while the islands in the Aegean Sea could hardly attain to independence
of their Athenian origin. Many of these establishments took place at an
early age; and if there were defects in the governments of the parent
states, the colonists did not possess philosophy or experience
sufficient to correct such evils in their own institutions, even if they
had not been, by other causes, deprived of the power. An immediate
necessity, connected with the support of life, was the main and direct
inducement to these undertakings, and there could hardly exist more than
the hope of a successful imitation of institutions with which they were
already acquainted, and of holding an equality with their neighbors in
the course of improvement.
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