ago has had an influence in bringing
about the rebellion.

Twenty years rolled by. London merchants dreamed of wealth in store for
them in Virginia. A company was formed to colonize the country. Many of
the merchants had spendthrift sons, who were also idle and given to bad
habits. These young fellows thought it degrading to work. In those
Western woods across the ocean, along the great rivers and upon the blue
mountains, they saw in imagination a wild, roving, reckless life. They
could hunt the wild beasts. They could live without the restraints of
society. They had heard wonderful stories of exhaustless mines of gold
and silver. There they could get rich, and that was the land for them.

A vessel with five hundred colonists was fitted out. There were only
sixteen men of the five hundred accustomed to work; the others called
themselves gentlemen and cavaliers. They settled at Jamestown. They
found no rich gold-mines, and wealth was not to be had on the fertile
plains without labor. Not knowing how to cultivate the soil, and hating
work, they had a hard time. They suffered for want of food. Many died
from starvation. Yet more of the same indolent class joined the
colony,--young men who had had rows with tutors at school, and who
had broken the heads of London watchmen in their midnight revels. A
historian of those times says that "they were fitter to breed a riot
than found a colony."

The merchants, finding that a different class of men was needed to save
the colony from ruin, sent over poor laboring men, who were apprenticed
to their sons. Thus the idle cavaliers were kept from starvation.
Instead of working themselves, they directed the poor, hard-working men,
and pocketed the profits.

Smoking began to be fashionable in England. Lawyers in big wigs,
ministers in black gowns, merchants seated in their counting-houses,
ladies in silks and satins, all took to this habit of the North American
Indians. Tobacco was in demand. Every ship from America was freighted
with it. The purple-flowered plant grew luxuriantly in the fields
of Virginia, and so through the labor of the poor men the indolent
cavaliers became rich.

As there were no women in the colony, some of the cavaliers sent over to
England and bought themselves wives, paying a hundred pounds of tobacco
for a wife. Others married Indian wives.

The jails of London were crowded with thieves and vagabonds. They
had committed crime and lost their freedom. To ge