Was This A Place to Send the Poor?

For all the statutes that hitherto can be devised, and the sharp execution of the same in punishing idle and lazy persons, for want of sufficient occasion of honest employments, cannot deliver our commonwealth from multitudes of loiterers and idle vagabonds. Truth it is that through our long peace and seldom sickness (two singular blessings of Almighty God) we are grown more populous than ever heretofore; so that now there are...so many, that they can hardly live one by another, nay rather they are ready to eat up one another; yea many thousands of idle persons are within this realm, which having no way to be set on work, be either mutinous and seek alteration in the state, or at least very burdensome to the commonwealth and often fall to pilfering and thieving and other lewdness, whereby all the prisons of the land are daily pestered and stuffed full of them, where either they pitifully pine away ~. Whereas if this voyage [to the New World] were put in execution, ~

America would ~ provide a place to send the ~ poor and ensure that they would contribute to the nation's wealth. Source ...

"And I have nothing to comfort me, nor is there nothing to be gotten here [in the New World] but sickness and death, except [in the event] that one had money to lay out in some things for profit. But I have nothing at all-no, not a shirt to my back but two rags (2), nor clothes but one poor suit, nor but one pair of shoes, but one pair of stockings, but one cap, [and] but two bands [collars]. But I am not half [of] a quarter so strong as I was ~, and all is for want of victuals; for I do protest unto you that I have eaten more in [one] day at home than I have allowed me here for a week." Source ...

Charters of Freedom - A New World Is At Hand