of the Virginia Company
was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The
prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had "to take any
that could be got of any sort on any terms." Little wonder that the
colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on
the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the
company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the
regulations of martial law.

The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not
greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock regime; for "when
our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip
from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how." The first
step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir
Thomas Dale "allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of
farms." It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most
honest men, when working for the company, "would take so much pains in a
weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day." The first general
distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic
system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the "head right"
was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were
regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But
in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one
to five shillings was usually sufficient to secure title to fifty acres,
and in 1705 the practice was legalized. Titles so secured were burdened
with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent
was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never
paid.

A greater incentive to settlement than free land was the discovery of a
crop that could be exported at a profit. Virginia had been founded to
raise silk and tropical products, and to supply England with naval
stores. But the difficulties were greater than had been anticipated, and
in 1616, when John Rolfe, having discovered a superior method of curing
the leaf, sold a cargo of native tobacco in London at a profit, the
future of Virginia was assured. Neither the plans of the company nor the
scruples of the king could prevail against the force of economic
self-interest. Twenty thousand pounds were exported in 1619, forty
thousand in 1622, sixty thousand in 1624. Tobacco became at once, and in
spite of long oppositi