Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/590

 All the influences of the seventeenth century, as has been seen, were hostile to the building of towns and cities, and this can also be said of the system of large plantations as long as it lasted in its primitive vigor. All the influences of the new r&eacute;gime are promotive of the growth of centres of population. The influences of the old r&eacute;gime, as founded in the seventeenth century, were such as to exalt the importance of the individual; the influences of the new are such as to raise the importance of the mass. The isolated life of the large plantations of the past fostered very marked traits in the character of each person, and in the character of each community; the subdivision of the land, by increasing the population enormously and bringing the people into the closest and most constant intercourse, will tend to reduce the inhabitants to a more uniform type, and this process will be daily hastened by the ever-growing facilities of communication with the country at large.

It is safe to predict that under the new economic system, Virginia will no longer produce the same class of men as she did under the old. Her illustrious citizens in the past sprang from the rural gentry. A rural gentry is impossible under prevailing conditions; the remnant which has survived to the present day is so small as to be unworthy of consideration from a numerical point of view, and in a few years it will be altogether gone. All that is highest and noblest in the civilization of the State will find its representation in the town and not as of old in the country.

Virginia, which was once imperial in extent, has shrunk into the confines of a narrow State, and the time may come when the name will be used to designate a geographical entity of the past. This result cannot be reached until there has been a complete subversion of all those principles that her people have cherished and revered, the seeds