During his tenure of the governorship, Nicholson recommended to the English Government that measures should be adopted to discourage woollen manufactures in the Colony, an additional indication that the opposition of the mother country to these manufactures had proved ineffective. Nicholson was justly charged by Beverley with gross inconsistency in this recommendation, for in the same letter, he had informed the English authorities that the price of tobacco had sunk to such a point that the people were unable to purchase clothing, which, as Beverley remarked with some bitterness, left it to be inferred that the planters were to go naked.[1] Nicholson was really advising Parliament to pass a law which it was impossible for that body to put in operation. To suppress the branch of domestic manufacture to which he referred, it would have been necessary to instruct constables to visit the different homes in their respective districts and destroy every loom and spindle. It is easy to see how such a duty, if performed at all, would have been performed with reluctance by the officers of the law, in consequence of their sympathy with their own people and the injury which they would have been inflicting upon their own interests. It is even probable that these officers would have openly connived at the disregard of such an Act of Parliament, on the part of the population at large; but, admitting that they might have sought with zeal and honesty to carry out their instructions, the distance between the plantations, and the remote life which the inhabitants led, would have been fatal obstacles to success in any attempt to put an end to local manufactures altogether. A prohibitory Act of this kind would not have had the approval of any class in the Colony, and the welfare of the whole population would have prompted a general combination to defeat the officers of the law.
- ↑ Beverley’s History of Virginia, pp. 83, 84.
