Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/403

 the provisions of this elaborate statute that only two years after its passage, the Assembly passed a second Act declaring that whoever established a market, &#8220;whether the merchants shall come for sale or not,&#8221; shall be looked upon as a public benefactor; a tacit confession that the previous law, like all laws restricting the action of the traders, had proved a failure. The instructions given to Culpeper in 1679, to establish markets and fairs in the Colony, seem to have come to nothing. All endeavors of the kind were likely to have the same end, not only because they were opposed to the interests of the merchants but also because of the configuration of the country, which was unfavorable to any concentration of the population, even of the same parts, for however brief a time.