t factor.

After 1620, when the London Company was dissolved by royal decree, and
the commerce of Virginia made free, the planters were the only factor.
Virginia, it was true, was made a royal province and put under deputy
rule, but the big planters contrived to get the laws and customs their
self-interest called for. There were only two classes--the rich
planters, with their gifts of land, their bond-servants and slaves and,
on the other hand, the poor whites. A middle class was entirely lacking.

As the supreme staple of commerce and as currency itself, tobacco could
buy anything, human, as well as inert, material. The labor question had
been sufficiently vanquished, but not so the domestic. Wives were much
needed; the officials in London instantly hearkened, and in 1620 sent
over sixty young women who were auctioned off and bought at from one
hundred and twenty to one hundred and sixty pounds of tobacco each.
Tobacco then sold at three shillings a pound. Its cultivation was
assiduously carried on. The use of the land mainly for agricultural
purposes led to the foundation of numerous settlements along the shores,
bays, rivers, and creeks with which Virginia is interspersed and which
afforded accessibility to the sea ports. As the years wore on and the
means and laborers of the planters increased, their lands became more
extensive, so that it was not an unusual thing to find plantations of
fifty or sixty thousand acres. But neither in Virginia nor in Maryland,
under the almost regal powers of Lord Baltimore who had propriety rights
over the whole of his province, were such huge estates to be seen as
were being donated in the northern colonies, especially in New
Netherlands and in New England.

FEUDAL GRANTS IN THE NORTH.

In its intense aim to settle New Netherlands and make use of its
resources, Holland, through the States General, offered extraordinary
inducements to promoters of colonization. The prospect of immense
estates, with feudal rights and privileges, was held out as the alluring
incentive. The bill of Freedoms and Exemptions of 1629 made easy the
possibility of becoming a lord of the soil with comprehensive
possessions and powers. Any man who should succeed in planting a colony
of fifty "souls," each of whom was to be more than fifteen years old,
was to become at once a patroon with all the rights of lordship. He was
permitted to own sixteen miles along shore or on one side of a navigable
river. An al