Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/641

 as in London. In all parts of England at this period, the expression &#8220;to spirit away&#8221; became one in common use, and it was full of mysterious and terrifying significance to the popular mind; when any one who belonged to an inferior station in life disappeared without leaving any explanation of his absence from the community in which he had been living, he was said to have been &#8220;spirited away,&#8221; and this whether he had gone out as a servant to the English Plantations or not. The persons who had earned by their peculiar occupation the name of &#8220;spirits&#8221; were invested with even greater awe than body-snatchers in our own time. There is, however, reason to think that the means employed by this class of men and women in the pursuit of their profession were in the majority of cases wholly commonplace; they played upon the ignorance of the simple-minded, the restlessness of persons in the lower walks of life who were anxious for a change, the despair of those who were sunk in hopeless poverty, and the eagerness of those who had been guilty of infractions of the law to escape from the country. It was to such persons as these that the spirits held out the fairest promises of good fortune in the lands beyond the sea when their terms of service had expired, and it is not strange that they entered readily into the net. However selfish the motives of the spirits, the work which they performed was one which, owing to the new opportunities offered their victims for improving the condition of their lives, ultimately redounded to the advantage of such as possessed elements of strength and respectability in their characters.

The persons who committed themselves voluntarily to the hands of the spirits were carried to the numerous