Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/370

 pounds in the Colony. To the younger son of the great landowner, whose principal estate had descended to his eldest, Virginia offered an excellent opportunity for the investment of what property he had inherited; instead of remaining in the mother country to eke out support of his family on fifty, sixty, or a hundred pounds sterling a year, he could make a settlement in the Colony, and so use his little fortune that in a few years he would be in as easy circumstances as his eldest brother. To the eldest brother himself, Bullock suggested the wisdom in those violent times of not keeping all that he possessed in the kingdom, where it was subject to diminution or entire destruction at any moment, but of dividing it into two parts, and investing one in land in Virginia, in which shape he predicted that in a short time it would become more valuable than the whole of the remainder in England, besides offering a safe harbor to which the owner could fly in case he was overtaken by the storms that the civil distractions of that age were so constantly creating.