and honor; and over to the right its porch commands a marble shaft on which is written, “Here lies Mary, the Mother of Washington.”  A little lower is the spot where John Smith gave the right hand to the ambassadors of King Powhatan.  In that old court-house the voice of Patrick Henry thundered for Liberty and Union.  Time was when the brave men on whose hearts rested the destinies of the New World made this the centre of activity and rule upon the continent; they lived and acted here as Anglo-Saxon blood should live and act, wherever it bears its rightful sceptre; but now one walks here as through the splendid ruins of some buried Nineveh, and emerges to find the very sunlight sad, as it reveals those who garnish the sepulchres of their ancestors with one hand, whilst with the other they stone and destroy the freedom and institutions which their fathers lived to build and died to defend.

And this, alas! is the first black line in the sketch of Virginia as it now is.  The true preface to the present edition of Virginia, which, unhappily, has been for many years stereotyped, may be found in a single entry of Captain John Smith’s journal:—­

“August, 1619.  A Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first that have ever touched the soil of Virginia.”

They have scarcely made it “sacred soil.”  A little entry it is, of what seemed then, perhaps, an unimportant event,—­but how pregnant with evil!

The very year in which that Dutch ship arrived with its freight of slaves at Jamestown, the Mayflower sailed with its freight of freemen for Plymouth.

Let us pause a moment and consider the prospects and opportunities which opened before the two bands of pilgrim.  How hard and bleak were the shores that received the Mayflower pilgrims!  Winter seemed the only season of the land to which they had come; when the snow disappeared, it was only to reveal a landscape of sand and rock.  To have soil they must pulverize rock.  Nature said to these exiles from a rich soil, with her sternest voice,—­“Here is no streaming breast:  sand with no gold mined:  all the wealth you get must be mined from your own hearts and coined by your own right hands!”

How different was it in Virginia!  Old John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, writing to the King in 1616, said,—­“Virginia is the same as it was, I meane for the goodness of the scate, and the fertilenesse of the land, and will, no doubt, so continue to the worlds end,—­a countrey as worthy of good report as can be declared by the pen of the best writer; a countrey spacious and wide, capable of many hundred thousands of inhabitants.”  It must be borne in mind that Rolfe’s idea of an inhabitant’s needs was that he should own a county or two to begin with, which will account for his moderate estimate of the number that could be accommodated upon a hundred thousand square miles.  He continues,—­“For the soil, most fertile to plant in; for ayre, fresh and temperate,