Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/409

 community of plantations, although so much of the fertility of the soil had been exhausted. In the seventeenth century, Virginia was still more distinctly a plantation community, a community of small principalities bound together by social ties, but not economically dependent upon each other. There was always a tendency in each plantation towards still greater concentration of its special interests, because the requirements of tobacco culture exercised an unceasing influence towards the enlargement of the boundaries of each estate, thus increasing its isolation from the community in general. One of the principal effects of the seclusion of plantation life in Virginia resulting from the enlargement of the plantation area, was to discourage the growth of the co&ouml;perative spirit among the people in their economic affairs. It is this spirit upon which manufactures in their perfected form must rely in great measure for support. The lack of this spirit explains to some extent the absence of small towns in the Colony in the seventeenth century, but this fact, as will be shown hereafter, was also due to the configuration of the country, which was opposed to a concentration of population. Such a concentration, of course, would have been highly favorable to manufactures. Beverley, who indulged a spirit of exaggeration to some extent, writing towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the English had been in possession of the country for nearly a hundred years, reproached the inhabitants not only for their slovenly and wasteful system of agriculture and their neglect of many products to which the soil was adapted, but also for their strong indisposition to supply themselves by local manufactures with a larger proportion of those articles which they had, from the foundation of the first settlement, been obtaining by importation from abroad. The Virginians, he said, sheared their sheep only to cool