ervants
to cultivate the fields and for other duties.

Many of the convicts became useful citizens of the colony after their
terms of servitude ended; but many did not reform and in time became
such a menace that for a period after 1670 the General Assembly forbade
that any more convicts be brought into the colony.

It can be seen therefore that from the beginning the population of
Virginia grew by immigration from various sources and that not all who
came to the colony were of the best type. The New England colonies had
the advantage that their immigrants came in large part from dissenters
from the Established Church of England. They came for "conscience
sake," however, and with their concept of theocratic government the New
England colonists could make it difficult indeed for immigrants they
did not welcome. After Roger Williams had been exiled to Rhode Island
and a few Quakers had been hanged on Boston Common, it was made clear
to Baptists and Quakers, to Anglicans and to witches that Virginia was
a more favorable climate for them than Massachusetts.

In contrast to New England, Virginia was founded and developed as a
cross-section of the whole life of the British Isles, with its evil as
well as its good; with ideals of freedom of thought which made no
attempt to control a man's conscience; and with an ever growing concept
of self-government and human freedom as already developed during nearly
a thousand years and set out by the common law and the statute law of
the race. Virginia was not founded upon any theocratic concept of
government under the influence of a priestly class.

The life and community consciousness that developed in Virginia into
the distinctive customs and ways of a well organized and firmly
established commonwealth were necessarily different from those of the
colonies in New England because of the differing conditions under which
men lived. In the township system of New England a village normally
became the township center and the people lived near enough to each
other to enable them to meet frequently; to work and play together; to
transact business; and to gossip of neighborhood affairs. In Virginia
it was otherwise. In Virginia families lived on separate farms and each
farm was of necessity a community within itself. Life was geared to the
basic fact that tobacco was the money crop, and also was the real
source of the financial strength and stability of the colony. Each
family required a far