Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/351

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all this outlay was for nothing. The Government spent £1500 in machines, salaries, bounties and filatures, and raised scarcely one thousand pounds of silk, and yet we are told that England expected the experiment to realize five hundred thousand pounds and to give employment to forty thousand people. To secure a high class of skilful, self-reliant colonists, the trustees had barred out slavery and rum. But the colony projected upon such lofty planes for some reason did not prosper. The people clamored for slaves to cultivate the rice-fields, and for the West Indian traffic in sugar and rum to build up their foreign trade. They fought the restricted land tenures; in fine, they wanted to become plain, every-day colonists, like the Carolinians and Virginians. They had been reinforced by the sturdy Salzsburgers, the canny Scots, the pious Moravians, and the thrifty Hebrews, but still the humanitarian principles of the charter did not insure them a thriving existence.

If silk culture failed, it is not a little remarkable that in the ranks of this same people, one hundred years later, an invention was perfected which gave rise to a new empire and enthroned as king the best fibre of the field. The filature