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That power was religion. In the English settlements to the south, it was religion more than any other factor that impelled men to leave the land of their birth and seek homes overseas. Men who could not find in England freedom to worship as their conscience dictated, or power to make others worship as they themselves pleased—Puritans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and, in Long Parliament days, Episcopalians—formed the backbone of the settlements on the Atlantic coast, and gave the young colonies their fateful bias toward self-government.

In New France it was not the discontent of a religious minority that sent men and women overseas. This solution of France's colonizing problem had been definitely rejected. France, like England, had its dissenters: there were in Europe no more resolute or enterprising men, no better stuff for the building of a new state, than the Huguenots. But they were not allowed to find an outlet in America, under the flag of France. For years advisers of the court, lay and cleric, urged that New France should be saved from the evil of a divided faith which had brought old France to the verge of ruin, and that the simplest way to avoid conflict was to bar the Huguenot. Insistent pressure and the flaring out again of Huguenot revolt, brought Richelieu to yield, and in the charter granted the Hundred Associates trading company, in 1627, all Huguenots and foreigners were forbidden to enter the colony. The discontented minority who might have emigrated to New France and who eventually were exiled from France to build up her rivals, were not allowed to grapple with the task. The contented majority for whom the colony was reserved had little wish to go.