Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/513

 CHAPTER VIII

ACQUISITION OF TITLE TO LAND &#8212; THE PATENT

charters of the London Company show that the English King tacitly assumed as positive and absolute a sovereignty over the whole territory of aboriginal Virginia as if it had been a part of his ancestral heritage, a course which has been imitated in the present century by the governments of Europe in the appropriation of equatorial Africa. The right of the Indians to the soil was not recognized, although they had been in possession of the country for immemorial ages; they were not in the beginning protected in the tenure of their ancient seats even to the extent of being regarded as subjects of the Power which had acquired a general title to the country according to the doctrine prevailing at that period, by the mere claim of discovery. So far as the charters of 1606 and 1609 throw any light on the question, the Virginia of the earliest adventurers might have been wholly devoid of inhabitants, a country upon which Nature had lavished many of her most valuable gifts, but which as yet had remained untrodden by the foot of man. In more modern times, while the moral sentiment of the world has not discouraged the forcible appropriation of barbarous lands, this step being regarded as promotive of the highest interests of their populations by bringing them under the improving influences of civilization, nevertheless an assumption by an encroaching nation of the right to