Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/262

 shown for tobacco, as will be pointed out later, lay deeper than any scheme of a designing alderman to give it the first importance by making it the only profitable crop for cultivation. Whether or not the members of the Company, who had control of its administration in 1619, recognized the force of the economic reasons causing that plant to be the most lucrative crop, they displayed great earnestness in carrying out the well-known wishes of the King, going so far as to send a treasurer to Virginia, who was not only to collect all that was due the Company in the form of quit-rents, a new source of revenue created by the subdivision of the public lands, but also to see that the instructions as to the degree of attention to be paid to the staple commodities be put in force by the authorities; an indication that it was anticipated that even the public officers of the Colony would be reluctant to subordinate the cultivation of tobacco to that of the other products of the soil.

It will be interesting to inquire in some detail as to the steps which were taken to promote the cultivation of the staple commodities. One of the earliest laws passed by the first Assembly that met in the Colony, the Assembly which Yeardley summoned in 1619, provided that every householder should reserve in store a barrel of Indian corn not only for himself, but also for every servant in his employment, but this grain was to be used only in case their necessities compelled it. The planter who had arrived in Virginia in the course of the previous twelve months was exempted from the scope of this law.