noble rivers, many of them navigable for a long distance from the sea, a fact that made it easy for plantations to rely upon supplies brought by vessels up the rivers, and that made the village grocery store, which was so prominent a feature in New England, a useless institution. The land was early found to be very favorable for the cultivation of tobacco, a crop which exhausts the soil more rapidly than almost any other. It was at first found more profitable to move to new fields after exhausting one plantation than to resort to the use of fertilizers, which accounts for the early scattering of the colonists over a wide area. Tobacco at once became the one crop of Virginia; it made manufacturing impossible. "Its influence," says one writer, "permeated the entire social sphere of the colony, directed its laws, and was an element in all its political and religious disturbances."
Social Conditions. — As a result of these combinations there arose a system of society which was peculiar to Virginia. The people did not settle in villages as in New England, but lived far distant from each other on large estates. "In Jamestown, the capital of the state, there were only eighteen houses." The owner of a large estate, grown rich from the cultivation of tobacco which he shipped, himself, to England, surrounded himself with laborers and slaves and lived in imitation of the owners of the English estates, a free and hospitable life, spending his leisure time in field sports and politics. Two classes of society were the result: the rich landowners, and the poor laborers and slaves. This condition of society made free schools impossible. During the whole
