Like all other prospectuses of colony planting, the
Declaration begins with a statement of geographical
location of the place to be settled and an account of the
persons supporting the project. It goes on to enumerate
the familiar motives of colonization; that is, the pro-
mulgation of the Christian Faith, the enlargement of
the dominions of the King and the profit of the indi-
vidual adventurer. It is a modern silliness to read
hypocrisy into the statement of the first of these mo-
tives, for if anything is certain, it is that the carrying of
the Cross to distant lands was an accepted motive of
colonization in the minds of Christian men—English,
French, or Spanish, Catholic or Protestant. Its affirma-
tion is the invariable factor in the writings that underlie
American colonization. Certainly no one could doubt
the sincerity of the writer of the Declaration after read-
ing the sentences he devotes to this feature of the
project, his naive adaptation of Gregory's "non Angli,
sed Angeli" phrase, his regions "white for the harvest",
his pathetic credulity in accepting and in passing on
the stories told him of the Indians begging for teachers
and sending their children to New England and to Vir-
ginia for baptism. Father Hughes has pointed to the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius as the source of the
spirit and even of the phraseology employed in this
business prospectus by the zealous and unworldly
Andrew White.⁸

   It cannot be claimed that the discovery of the printed
Declaration adds sensationally to the accepted body of
historical fact. Except for the note on pages 7 and 8, its
subject matter has been familiar to historians for nearly
a century through the medium of the McSherry Codex.
But the existence of the tract in printed form has, none

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