on on the part of the home Government remained,
the chief enterprise of the colony. Virginia was founded on tobacco, and
like the other Southern colonies, sacrificed everything to the raising
of her most important commodity; and for Virginia, as for the other
Southern colonies, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of her
great staple were of determining influence in the development of her
social institutions.

Those who were interested in the Virginia Company loudly proclaimed that
the recall of the charter would ruin the colony. But it was population,
rather than corporate or royal control, that Virginia needed, and the
profits from tobacco proved a more powerful incentive to large families
and immigration than all the efforts of king or company. Within a decade
after 1624 the number of settlers increased from 1232 to 5000. In 1649
the population had reached 15,000, and in 1670 it stood at 38,000. Land
was virtually free to those who could pay for the cost of clearing, and
the rich soil of the tide-water bottoms assured an easy living and the
prospect of accumulating a competence. As the conditions of life grew
easier, the Virginians, with the true instinct of frontiersmen,
described America as God's country, abounding in every good thing:
"Seldom any that hath continued in Virginia any time will or do desire
to live in England, but put back with what expedition they can." The
glowing accounts which reached England appealed to those of every class
whose straitened circumstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to
a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and
whose children would always remain yeomen; the lawyer and the physician,
the merchant and the clergyman, ambitious to become landowners and play
the gentleman; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were
no assured avenues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World.
Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of
living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing
to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of economic
and social enfranchisement.

Since the main road to wealth and influence in Virginia was the raising
of tobacco, every emigrant with capital to invest at once became a
landowner; and the conditions of tobacco-planting disposed him to
enlarge his estate as rapidly as possible. It is true that one advantage
of tobacco over other products