Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/369

 secured as agricultural servants, and in paying the charges entailed in their transportation to Virginia; six pounds sterling in purchasing two guns, and the necessary amount of powder and shot, and also tips and shares for ploughs, and iron tools of different sorts; thirty pounds sterling in buying merchandise to be exchanged in the Colony for cattle; eleven pounds sterling in paying commissions and the like fees, and the remainder in covering the rates of insurance. At the end, of the operations of the second year, the planter, who in the beginning had invested barely fifty pounds sterling, finds himself in possession of an estate worth six hundred, in which the value of his live stock is included. Our author compares the condition of such a man with that of the English farmer, whose only aim was to secure enough by his exertions to enable him to pay the rent of his landlord, and to earn a bare subsistence for himself and his family, his life being made up of an unbroken round of grinding labor, unrelieved by even a fleeting hope of accumulating a small pecuniary independence. So great was the confidence of Bullock in the success of the English farmer who, would emigrate from his native country, to become a planter in Virginia, that he thought it proper to warn all who entertained such an intention, against that inflation of mind which follows the acquisition of riches, and to urge upon them in anticipation of the certain good fortune to which they would attain in the Colony, to hold Providence always in remembrance, as the cause of their happy condition.

Bullock did not restrict to the English farmer the alluring prospect of the great advantages to be obtained by removing to Virginia. The yeoman who drew an annual income of ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds sterling from his fields in England, could rely upon securing an income of three hundred