le method of culture learned experimentally, when the
land was offered to individual proprietors by the king,
(James I.) Very little else was to be obtained from the soil
which would be of value to send to Europe, without an
application to it of a higher degree of art than the slaves,
or stupid, careless servants of the proprietors could
readily be forced to use. Although tobacco had been
introduced into England but a few years, an enormous number
of persons had initiated themselves in the appreciation of
its mysterious value.

"The king, having taken a violent prejudice against it,
though he saw no harm in the distillation of grain, had
forbidden that it should be cultivated in England. Virginia,
therefore, had every advantage to supply the demand.
Merchants and the super-cargoes of ships, arriving with
slaves from Africa, or manufactured goods, spirits, or other
luxuries from England, very gladly bartered them with the
planters for tobacco, but for nothing else. Tobacco,
therefore, stood for money, and the passion for raising it,
to the exclusion of everything else, became a mania, like
the 'California fever' of 1849.

"The culture being once established, there were many reasons
growing out of the social structure of the colony, which,
for more than a century, kept the industry of the Virginians
confined to this one staple. These reasons were chiefly the
difficulty of breaking the slaves, or training the
bond-servants to new methods of labor, the want of
enterprise or ingenuity of the proprietors to contrive other
profitable occupations for them, and the difficulty or
expense of distributing the guard or oversight, without
which it was impossible to get any work done at all, if the
laborers were separated, or worked in any other way than
side by side, in gangs, as in the tobacco-fields.

"Owing to these causes the planters kept on raising tobacco
with hardly sufficient intermission to provide sustenance,
though often, by reason of the excessive quantity raised,
scarcely anything could be got for it. Tobacco is not now
considered peculiarly and excessively exhaustive; in a
judicious rotation, especially as a preparation for wheat,
it is an admirable fallow crop, and, under a scientific
system of agriculture, it is gr