far in advance of the Atlantic colonies and in some respects of England. Virginia, although the most populous of the Atlantic colonies, except only Massachusetts, was the most backward in civilization. No improvement could be expected from her frontiersmen, living in semi-barbarism, and little from her aristocratic and indolent planters, and, of course, none at all from the abject white servants and still more abject black slaves of the planters. The colony had a college or two for the sons of rich planters, but few public schools for the common people, and only two or three printing-presses. All the other Atlantic colonies south of Pennsylvania were like Virginia, although in a less degree.
In Massachusetts, improvement was checked by another cause—religious bigotry and superstition. Although there were printing-presses and public schools in the colony, the teaching, beyond the merest rudiments of English, was only Latin and theology. One of their own writers on the agriculture of New England before the Revolution says: "The man who ventured to try experiments was looked on with displeasure. If one did not plant just as many acres of corn as his father
