Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/610

 upon every English community by the number of persons crying in the public ear for assistance in the terrible struggle for their daily food. It has been seen how firm the English people were in their determination that England should secure the fullest benefit of the commodities of the Colony, one of the most important objects of its settlement being to open up a country where those articles might be obtained which were then imported into the kingdom from the continents of Europe and Asia at a heavy expense and with a serious risk of total loss. The Navigation Acts not only obstructed the further diversion to foreign ports of the valuable products of Virginia, but fostered that growth in shipping which the foundation of the Colony at Jamestown had been intended to promote. In a later chapter, it will be shown that the mother country also insisted upon a retention of another of the advantages which colonization had been expected, and in reality did create, that is to say, the establishment of a new market for the sale of English manufactured goods. In regarding Virginia, therefore, as a place to which its surplus lower population might be encouraged to withdraw, England was merely seeking to secure still another of those benefits which it had been anticipated would arise from the settlement of the land beyond the sea.

If the conditions prevailing in England in the interval between 1600 and 1700 decidedly promoted the abandonment of the kingdom by a valuable part of its laboring population, the inducements offered by Virginia to this class as a scene for a new start in life were extraordinary. Contemporaneous writers, who were familiar from personal observation with the state of that Colony, have declared that the only thing dear in its communities was labor, and this was as true at the end of the century as it was in the