ly slavery would be abolished. But the negro race in America
cannot be abolished, it cannot be shipped back to Africa, it cannot well
be absorbed into the white population. Today California is struggling to
avoid a like problem by excluding the Japanese, while Canada, Australia
and New Zealand are closing their doors to Orientals of all kinds.

Thus Virginia, during its century of white immigration, was storing up
no perplexing difficulties for the future, was developing slowly but
surely into an industrious, democratic, Anglo-Saxon community. Not until
the black flood of slaves was turned loose upon her, strangling her
peasantry and revolutionizing her industrial and social life, was her
future put in pawn. The white servants, so far as they remained in the
colony, became bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, promised her a
homogeneous race, a sound economic and political development.

When the alien newcomer to the United States sees from the deck of his
steamer the Statue of Liberty and the ragged sky line of lower
Manhattan, he feels that the goal of his ambition has been reached, that
the land of opportunity lies before him. But to the indentured settler
of the Seventeenth century, his arrival in the James or the York was but
the beginning of his struggles. Before he could grasp the riches of the
New World, he must pay the price of his passage, must work out through
arduous years the indenture to which he had affixed his signature.

And these years were filled not only with toil, perhaps with hardship,
but with the greatest peril. He might account himself fortunate indeed
if during the first twelve months he escaped the so-called Virginia
sickness. Tidewater Virginia for the English settlers was a pest-ridden
place. The low and marshy ground, the swarming mosquitoes, the hot sun,
the unwholesome drinking water combined to produce an unending epidemic
of dysentery and malaria. And at frequent intervals, especially in the
early years, yellow fever, scurvy and plague swept over the infant
colony, leaving behind a ghastly train of suffering and death.[3-1] At
one time the mortality among the settlers upon the James ran as high as
75 per cent and for a while it seemed that this attempt of the British
nation to secure a foothold upon the American continent must end in
failure.[3-2]

But as the years wore on better conditions prevailed. Governor Berkeley
testified in 1671, "there is not oft seasoned hands (as we term th