Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/56

 came with the second supply ship in 1608, "Mistresse Forest and Anne Buras, her maide."

Recognizing the importance of permanent ties binding the colonists to America, the Company itself undertook to encourage the migration of women; in 1619 it sent at its own risk ninety maidens, "agreeable persons, young and incorrupt," and "sold them with their own consent to settlers as wives at the cost of their transportation." Since this venture yielded a fair profit to the Company besides wielding a moderating influence on the turbulence of the men, other consignments of women were sent from year to year—sometimes with great difficulty, because it was no easy thing to induce comely English maidens "of virtuous education, young, handsome, and well-recommended" to tempt fortune by searching for a good husband among the hustling planters who pressed around the landing stage and offered the purchase money in tobacco. Though the process was rough and ready, it helped to fill Virginia with homes and, as Lord Delaware, the governor, once remarked, with "honest laborers burdened with children." When in the course of time life in the province became reasonably secure, emigrants of every kind took wives and children with them; and so, at the end of thirty years, there rose in Virginia a generation born on the soil, who could not say with their progenitors, "Lord, bless England, our sweet native country."

The second element essential to the prosperity of the landowners, an abundant supply of workers willing to till plantations under the hot sun of Virginia, was even harder to get, but before the close of the Company's career a solution of that problem was found. At the very outset the corporation adopted a practice of sending over on its own account "indentured servants" bound to labor for a term of years, thereby setting an example which was quickly followed by adventurers of the purse and other colonists who bought land from the Company. Some of these laborers, men and women, boys and girls alike, were lured on shipboard by