Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/74

 manures are so effective in bringing back the fertility which has been lost. The newly cleared field is still the soil which is most desired, and there is still and will always be the same inclination to rely on nature for the restoration of land. This is not the fault of inherited carelessness in agriculture, but it is a condition which has descended from the seventeenth to the present century in a form modified only by the growth of population. If the culture of tobacco were very profitable, the tendency to enlarge each estate would be just as strong to-day in Virginia, with labor emancipated, as it was during the existence of slavery. That institution only promoted the extension of the plantation by cheapening labor to the lowest point, which to that degree increased the owner&#8217;s returns from his crops, enabling him to invest a greater sum each year in land. During the first sixty years in the history of the Colony, the slave was an insignificant element in the community, and yet during this long period there are to be observed the most marked indications of the tendency to appropriate large tracts. This disposition was manifest from the start, as the result not of the character of the labor system in operation, but of the nature of tobacco itself. The system of labor permitted the exhibition of this disposition but did not create it. The agriculture of Virginia did not reach an extraordinary degree of prosperity until the administration of Spotswood, and this is to be partially explained by the fact that not until one hundred years had passed was the number of slaves imported into