It would have been supposed that the result of the Act of 1680 would have discouraged all further efforts to revive this class of laws. Eleven years later, however, what was known as the Act for Ports was passed. This measure, like the majority of similar ones in the past, became a law at the suggestion of the man who was at that time at the head of affairs in Virginia. In this instance, it was Governor Nicholson.[1] The people at large were adverse to the passage of such a statute, as we know from records left by contemporaneous observers.[2] It was not always an easy matter, they argued, for the inhabitants of the Colony to earn a livelihood, though dwelling dispersed, as they were then doing, in a manner to leave ground for each individual to cultivate. How much more difficult for a hundred families to obtain subsistence when they should be confined to an area not more than half a mile in extent! Now, this was an entirely valid inference to draw in the light of the peculiar economic system prevailing in Virginia; there was no substantial interest demanding the presence of a hundred families upon any one contracted site in the Colony, and in the absence of such an interest, they must necessarily lack the means of support and in consequence suffer severely. It was pointed out at the time of the passage of the Act for Ports that the greater number of Burgesses were entirely ignorant of the conveniences and advantages of towns, having never in their lives enjoyed an opportunity of visiting one. The authors of the Present State of Virginia, 1697, writing in the closing years of the seventeenth century, agreed with Secretary Spencer in thinking that the mistake committed in the Acts establishing towns and ports of entry was in the appointment of too
Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/567
This page needs to be proofread.
