Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/535

 isolation, this economic freedom, was thoroughly antagonistic to the concentration of population at different places in the Colony in the form of towns. The plantation was a small principality, the number of inhabitants of which was not in proportion to the extent of the property to which they were attached. The dependence of the servants and slaves upon their master was increased by the distance which lay between them and the settlements of the adjacent plantations, and the same fact increased the importance of the planter himself. It is easily perceived that the independence of his life, an independence extending to every branch of his affairs, social and economic, would have cultivated in him a strong distaste for the confined existence of residents in cities, which he had either observed when visiting England, or had been informed of through books or by travellers. Accustomed to the freedom of his own fields, woods, and streams, assured of the absolute subservience of the whole population of his plantation, with no neighbors of his own class sufficiently near to disturb his sense of local supremacy, with a firm conviction derived from practical experience that the main product of his soil compelled him to be always widening the area which he cultivated, with an inclination, moreover, for agricultural pursuits inherited from his English forefathers, confirmed and strengthened by all the conditions of his situation, it is natural that he should have exhibited no disposition to drift towards the life of towns. Indeed, it would have been remarkable if the gravitation had not been in the other direction.

I have already dwelt upon the effect of this tendency in discouraging the growth of the co&ouml;perative spirit among the planters. As the sense of personal independence increased, an inevitable result of the plantation life, the disinclination of the individual to combine with other individuals of the