Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/380

 Strong influences were at work in the Colony encouraging the planter on the one hand to obtain credit from his merchant, whether residing in Virginia or acting in the person of his factor, and disposing the merchant on the other to extend it. Of all the staple crops, with the exception of cotton, tobacco is attended in its culture by the most numerous elements of speculation on account of the rapid fluctuations in its price. It may be depressed in the market during one year, and twelve months later be selling at very high rates. This was true of tobacco in the seventeenth century, as it is of the same commodity in the nineteenth. The Virginian planter in the seventeenth century, however much discouraged as to the results of the operations of one season, could indulge the hope that the following season would not only restore what he had lost on the crop of the present year, but add to the amount the margin of a very handsome profit. This expectation, which had its justification in actual experience, led him to make purchases on credit of goods from the importing merchants which the tobacco of the succeeding year did not always enable him to cover, and a series of unprosperous years not infrequently involved him in a slough of debts from which it was difficult, and, in many cases, impossible, to extricate himself. The merchant doubtless took a clearer view of the situation. It was natural that he should not be as sanguine as to the prices of future crops as the planter, and he sought to discount a possible period of depression twelve months later by selling not only at lucrative rates, but also in figures representing money sterling.

For the special encouragement of traders, an Act was passed in 1633 requiring that all contracts and bargains should be made and all accounts kept in money sterling, and not in tobacco, according to the prevailing custom at