Excerpt from Celebration of 300th Anniversary: First American Legislative Assembly and the Signing of the Pilgrims' Mayflower Compact The first assembly that ever sat on American soil was the product of mixed motives. The father of the assembly, Sir Edwin Sandys, was one of the great English liberals, a stalwart upholder of the rights of the people, but he was also the treasurer of the Virginia Company, a commercial enterprise. Industrial communism in Virginia had failed, as it failed in Plymouth, and Sir Edwin was moved to find a way to more plentiful production by arousing the dormant energy of the planters. That this fell in with his desire to promote self-government is true, but it is a question how far he would have been moved to change the Virginia system if the exports of tobacco and other products had been large under the communistic regime. So the first representative government of America sprang partly from the liberal move ment in England and partly from the necessity of making the settlers work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.