Richard Hakluyt, writing in 1588, was referring to the Elizabethan poor whose ranks were newly enlarged by the economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century. His rationale for government-sponsored colonization has hardly been improved upon in the subsequent four hundred years and examples of its application can be found over much of the globe, from Acadians in Louisiana to convicts in Australia. Two hundred and forty years after Hakluyt, the American Colonization Society was founded in Washington, D.C., to encourage the emigration of American free blacks to Africa.