Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/257

 said that within the same length of time, it was easier for persons residing in either to gain fortunes than it would have been in the mother country.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a perfectly accurate idea of the value of the estates owned by the planters of Virginia in the seventeenth century. Only an approximate notion can be formed. As the volume of the personal property is set forth in the innumerable inventories preserved in the county records, this portion of the fortunes of that age is easily estimated. The real difficulty lies in our inability to obtain full information as to the extent of the landed interest held by individual planters, as this part of their estates was not like personalty listed for valuation.

It would be interesting to know what was the average amount of personal property brought over to Virginia by the great body of that class of settlers who immediately upon their arrival in the Colony took an independent position in the community in point of fortune. Reference has already been made to the articles of a varied character which Evelyn, Williams, and Bullock strongly recommended that every English emigrant who was in possession of means and proposed to open a plantation should carry over with him. It is highly probable that the bulk of the assortments suggested by these writers were brought over by every man who entered Virginia with the intention of acquiring an interest more or less extensive in its soil. The agent who was in correspondence with Sir Edward Verney in 1634, respecting the course to be pursued on the removal of Sir Edward&#8217;s son to the Colony, where he designed to establish himself as a planter, stated that the cost entailed in the purchase of goods and in the