miles from the
parish church, and the assembly would not augment the taxes by narrowing
the bounds of the parishes, even to avoid the dangers of "paganism,
atheism, or sectaries." Schism was threatening "to creep into the
church, and to generate faction in the civil government."[382:A] "In
Virginia," says the Rev. Hugh Jones,[382:B] "there is no ecclesiastical
court, so that vice, profaneness, and immorality are not suppressed. The
people hate the very name of bishop's court." "All which things," he
adds, "make it absolutely necessary for a bishop to be settled there, to
pave the way for mitres in English America."

There is preserved the record of the trial of Grace Sherwood, in the
County of Princess Anne, for witchcraft. Being put in the water, with
her hands bound, she was found to swim. A jury of old women having
examined her, reported that "she was not like them." She was ordered by
the court to be secured "by irons, or otherwise," in jail for farther
trial. The picturesque inlet where she was put in the water is still
known as "Witch Duck." The custom of nailing horse-shoes to the doors to
keep out witches is not yet entirely obsolete.

The Virginians at this time were deterred from sending their children
across the Atlantic to be educated, through fear of the smallpox.[382:C]

From the statistics of the year 1715, it appears that Virginia was, in
population second only to Massachusetts,[383:A] which exceeded her in
total number by one thousand, and in the number of whites by twenty-two
thousand. All the colonies were at this time slave-holding; the seven
Northern ones comprising an aggregate of 12,150 slaves, and the four
Southern ones 46,700. The proportion of whites to negroes in Virginia
was upwards of four to one. Their condition was one of rather rigorous
servitude. The number of Africans imported into Virginia during the
reign of George the First was upwards of ten thousand. In addition to
the slaves, the Virginians had three kinds of white servants,--some
hired in the ordinary way; others, called kids, bound by indenture for
four or five years; the third class consisted of convicts. The two
colonies, Virginia and Maryland, supplied the mother country, in
exchange for her manufactures, with upwards of twenty-five millions of
pounds of tobacco, of which there were afterwards exported more than
seventeen millions, leaving for internal consumption more than eight
millions. Besides the revenue which Great B