Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/509

 on account of the poverty of that country or its infancy as an organized community. The buyer and seller simply exchanged articles. The buyer was a seller and the seller a buyer at the same moment. There was no occasion for the passage of a single coin from one to the other. As the population enlarged, and the volume of exported tobacco and imported merchandise increased, the demand for coin in the transfer of the great agricultural product of Virginia for the manufactured goods of England remained in proportion to the extent of the transaction almost as small. The principle governing it continued to be in its essence the same. The Virginians still desired to procure English commodities, the English merchants were still anxious to obtain the staple of the Colony. It was not necessary for the Virginian landowner to transport his crops to the West Indies to secure articles to be disposed of in England for coin to be used in the purchase of English goods, as was the case with the farmer of New England in selling his grain and other provisions. The Magazine set up at Jamestown during the administration of the Company was in later periods practically established upon each estate by an English or native merchant when he exchanged his imported goods for the planter&#8217;s tobacco, still without the intervention of a single coin. The inconveniences of such a system were felt not in the operation of external trade, that is to say, in the barter of Virginian for English products or the reverse, but in the working of internal affairs, in the transactions of local business, for instance, in the sale of the commodity of labor and professional knowledge and the like.

The peculiar character of the commercial relations existing in the seventeenth century between Virginia and England was precisely what had been desired as well as