merely to consign his crop to the sailors who manned the vessel by the temporary transfer of the keys of his barns. When he sold, not to the owner of the ship, but to the local merchant who had supplied him with goods, the process of delivery was equally free from complication and indirectness. From this, it will be seen that the Virginian planter of the seventeenth century had but a small inducement to begin or promote a movement in favor of local manufactures on a scale of great importance, even if we suppose that the influence of all the economic interests of the mother country would not have been set against such a movement.
There was no inherent repugnance in the English stock transferred to the valleys of the James and York, to the pursuit of manufactures, although they leaned, like men of their race in the mother country, towards an agricultural life. They became an agricultural people by force of the conditions surrounding them from the foundation of the earliest settlement. The power of the English Government was used to divert their attention from manufactures even in the rudest form; many influences united to discourage the growth of manufacturing interests in the Virginian Colony as in all other colonies, however populous, but even if the English authorities had sought to advance the prosperity of these interests in Virginia in the seventeenth century, and the local conditions had been favorable to a manufacturing spirit, there would doubtless still have been reason to remark upon the disinclination of the people to produce their own manufactured supplies without any assistance from the outside. In the long period between the close of the Revolution and the breaking out of the late war between the sections, when all restrictions upon the growth of manufactures had been removed, the State remained a
