found their way annually to Virginia. "The people of Virginia had not been settled in their minds," and as, before the recent changes, they retained the design of ultimately returning to England, it was necessary to multiply attachments to the soil. Few women had dared to cross the Atlantic; but now the promise of prosperity induced ninety agreeable persons, young and incorrupt, to listen to the advice of Sandys, and embark for the colony, where they were assured of a wel come. They were transported at the expense of the company, and were married to its tenants, or to men who were able to support them, and who willingly defrayed the costs of their passage, which were rigorously demanded. The adventure, which had been in part a mercantile speculation, succeeded so well that it was proposed to send the next year another consignment of one hundred; but, before these could be collected, the company found itself so poor that its design could be accomplished only by a subscription. After some delays, sixty were actually despatched, maids of virtuous education, young, handsome, and well recommended. The price rose from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco, or even more; so that all the original charges might be repaid. The debt for a wife was a debt of honor, and took precedence of any other; and the company, in conferring employments, gave a preference to married men. With domestic ties, habits of thrift were formed. Within three years, fifty patents for land were granted, and a state rose on solid foundations in the New World. Virginia was a place of refuge even for Puritans.

Before Virginia had been planted, King James found in his hostility to the use of tobacco a convenient argument for the excessive tax which a royal ordinance imposed on its consumption. When the weed had become the staple of Virginia, the sale of it in England was prohibited unless the heavy impost had been paid, and a new proclamation forbade its culture in England and Wales. In the parliament of 1621 Lord Coke reminded the commons of the usurpation of authority on the part of the monarch who had taxed the produce of the colonies without their consent and without an act of the national legislature.

Besides providing for emigration, the London company, under the lead of Southampton, proceeded to redress former wrongs, and to protect colonial liberty by written guarantees. In the case of the appeal to the London company from sentence of death pronounced by Argall, his friends, with the earl of Warwick at their head, excused him by pretending that martial law is the noblest kind of trial, because soldiers and men of the sword were the judges. This opinion was overthrown, and the right of the colonists to trial by jury sustained. Nor was it long before the freedom of the northern fisheries was equally asserted, and the monopoly of a rival corporation successfully opposed. Lord Bacon, who, at the time of Newport's first voyage with emigrants for Virginia, classed the enterprise with the romance of " Amadis de Gaul," now said of the plantation: “Certainly it is with the kingdoms of earth as it is in the kingdom of heaven, sometimes a grain of mustard-seed proves a great tree. Who can tell?" "Should the plantation go on increasing as under the government of that popular Lord Southampton," said Gondomar, then Spanish ambassador in England, "my master's West Indies and his Mexico will shortly be visited, by sea and by land, from those planters in Virginia.”

The company had silently approved the colonial assembly which had been convened by Sir George Yeardley; on the twenty-fourth of July, 1621, a memorable ordinance established for the colony a written constitution. The prescribed form of government was analogous to the English constitution, and was, with some modifications, the model of the systems which were afterward introduced into the various royal provinces. Its purpose was declared to be "the greatest comfort and benefit to the people, and the prevention of injustice, grievances, and oppression." Its terms are few and simple: a governor, to be appointed by the company; a permanent council, likewise to be appointed by the company; a general assembly, to be convened yearly, and to consist of the members of the council, and of two burgesses to be chosen from each of the several plantations by the respective inhabitants. The assembly might exercise full legislative authority, a negative voice being reserved to the governor; but no law or ordinance

would be valid unless ratified by the company in England. It was further agreed that, after the government of the colony should have once been framed, no orders of the court in London should bind the colony, unless they should in like manner be ratified by the general assembly. The courts of justice were required to conform to the laws and manner of trial used in the realm of England.

Such was the constitution which Sir Francis Wyatt, the successor of the mild but inefficient Yeardley, was commissioned to bear to the colony. The system of representative government and trial by jury thus became in the new hemisphere an acknowledged right. On this ordinance Virginia erected the superstructure of her liberties. Its influences were wide and enduring, and can be traced through all her history. It constituted the plantation, in its infancy, a nursery of freemen; and succeeding generations learned to cherish institutions which were as old as the first period of the prosperity of their fathers. The privileges then conceded could never be wrested from the Virginians; and, as new colonies arose at the south, their proprietaries could hope to win emigrants only by bestowing franchises as large as those enjoyed by their elder rival. The London company merits the praise of having auspicated liberty in America. It may be doubted whether any public act during the reign of King James was of more permanent or pervading influence; and it reflects honor on Sir Edwin Sandys, the earl of Southampton, Nicholas Ferrar, and the patriot royalists of England, that, though they were unable to establish guarantees of a liberal administration at home, they were careful to connect popular freedom inseparably with the life, prosperity, and state of society of Virginia.

SLAVERY.

CHAPTER VIII.

DISSOLUTION OF THE LONDON COMPANY.

WHILE Virginia, by the concession of a representative government, was constituted the asylum of liberty, it became the abode of hereditary bondsmen.

Slavery and the slave-trade are older than the records of human society; they are found to have existed wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pastoral or agricultural life; and, with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe. The oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are the results of slave labor. The founder of the Jewish people was a slave-holder and a purchaser of slaves. The Hebrews, when they broke from their own thraldom, planted slavery in the promised land. Tyre, the oldest commercial city of Phœnicia, was, like Babylon, a market "for the persons of men."

Old as are the traditions of Greece, slavery is older. The wrath of Achilles grew out of a quarrel for a slave; Grecian dames had servile attendants; the heroes before Troy made excursions into the neighboring villages and towns to enslave the inhabitants. Greek pirates, roving, like the corsairs of Barbary, in quest of men, laid the foundations of Greek commerce; each commercial town was a slave-mart; and every cottage near the sea-side was in danger from the kidnapper. Greeks enslaved each other. The language of Homer was the mother tongue of the Helots; the Grecian city that warred on its neighbor city made of its captives a source of profit; the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred More than four centu

and language into hopeless slavery.

ries before the Christian era, Alcidamas, a pupil of Gorgias,

taught that "God has sent forth all men free; nature has made no man slave." While one class of Greek authors of that period confounded the authority of master and head of a family, others asserted that the relation of master and slave is conventional; that freedom is the law of nature, which knows no difference between master and slave; that slavery is the child of violence, and inherently unjust. "A man, O my master," so speaks the slave in a comedy of Philemon, "because he is a slave, does not cease to be a man. He is of the same flesh with you. Nature makes no slaves." Aristotle, though he recognises "living chattels " as a part of the complete family, has left on record his most deliberate judg ment, that the prize of freedom should be placed within the reach of every slave. Yet the idea of universal free labor was only a dormant bud, not to be quickened for many cen

turies.

Slavery hastened the fall of the commonwealth of Rome. The power of the father to sell his children, of the creditor to sell his insolvent debtor, of the warrior to sell his captive, carried it into the bosom of every family, into the conditions of every contract, into the heart of every unhappy land that was invaded by the Roman eagle. The slave-markets of Rome were filled with men of various nations and colors. "Slaves are they!" writes Seneca; "say that they are men." The golden-mouthed orator Dion inveighs against hereditary slavery as at war with right. "By the law of nature, all men are born free," are the words of Ulpian. The Roman digests pronounce slavery "contrary to nature."

In the middle age the pirate and the kidnapper and the conqueror still continued the slave-trade. The Saxon race carried the most repulsive forms of slavery to England, where not half the population could assert a right to freedom, and where the price of a man was but four times the price of an ox. In defiance of severe penalties, the Saxons long continued to sell their own kindred into slavery on the continent. Even after the conquest, slaves were exported from England to Ireland, till, in 1102, a national synod of the Irish, to remove the pretext for an invasion, decreed the emancipation of all their English slaves.