Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/608

 of the people of Sheffield, in 1615, was perhaps not exceptional. In a survey of its population made in that year, it was discovered that seven hundred and twenty-five of its twenty-two hundred and seven inhabitants were compelled to rely in part upon the charity of their neighbors for a subsistence. Of the two hundred and sixty householders who resided in the town, only one hundred were able to afford relief to the men and women around them who were struggling to keep from starvation; the remainder lived upon such a narrow margin of subsistence that an attack of sickness which continued for a fortnight drove them to absolute beggary. Children only a few years of age were required to work to contribute to the meagre support of their families.

It did not follow that the mass of English laborers in this age were morally degraded because they were exposed to such harsh influences in their daily lives. They belonged to a class of men and women who constituted one of the sturdiest sections of the population even in the seventeenth century, and who, in the nineteenth, compare most favorably both physically and morally with any body of agricultural laboring men in the world. The economic condition of this class in the seventeenth century could not destroy the great qualities that were inherent in the stock from which they sprung, and it only required more enlightened legislation and more wholesome local surroundings to restore these qualities to their original vigor. The work of colonization which has been performed by the people of England surpasses, both in extent and beneficence, that of any other race which has left an impression upon universal history, and the part the manual laborers have taken in this work is not less memorable than the part taken by the higher classes of the nation.