thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years:  for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government.  God keep us from both!"[211]

Thus was the entire colony in ignorance and superstition, and it was the policy of the home government to keep out the light.  The sentiments of Berkeley were applauded in official circles in England, and most rigorously carried out by his successor who, in 1682, with the concurrence of the council, put John Buckner under bonds for introducing the art of printing into the colony.[212] This prohibition continued until 1733.  If the whites of the colony were left in ignorance, what must have been the mental and moral condition of the slaves?  The ignorance of the whites made them the pliant tools of the London Company, and the Negroes in turn were compelled to submit to a condition “of rather rigorous servitude."[213] This treatment has its reflexive influence on the planters.  Men fear most the ghosts of their sins, and for cruel deeds rather expect and dread “the reward in the life that now is.”  So no wonder Dinwiddie wrote the father of Charles James Fox in 1758:  “We dare not venture to part with any of our white men any distance, as we must have a watchful eye over our negro slaves.”

In 1648, as we mentioned some pages back, there were about three hundred slaves in the colony.  Slow coming at first, but at length they began to increase rapidly, so that in fifty years they had increased one hundred per cent.  In 1671 they were two thousand strong, and all, up to that date, direct from Africa.  In 1715 there were twenty-three thousand slaves against seventy-two thousand whites.[214] By the year 1758 the slave population had increased to the alarming number of over one hundred thousand, which was a little less than the numerical strength of the whites.

During this period of a century and a half, slavery took deep root in the colony of Virginia, and attained unwieldy and alarming proportions.  It had sent its dark death-roots into the fibre and organism of the political, judicial, social, and religious life of the people.  It was crystallized now into a domestic institution.  It existed in contemplation of legislative enactment, and had high judicial recognition through the solemn forms of law.  The Church had proclaimed it a “sacred institution,” and the clergy had covered it with the sanction of their ecclesiastical office.  There it stood, an organized system,—­the dark problem of the uncertain future:  more terrible to the colonists in its awful, spectral silence during the years of the Revolution than the victorious guns of the French and Continental armies, which startled the English lion from his hurtful hold at the throat of white men’s liberties—­black men had no country, no liberty—­in this new world in the West.  But, like the dead body of the Roman murderer’s victim, slavery was a curse that pursued the colonists evermore.