directly, but in the time and trouble in effecting the exchange, that the people make shift and do without it. And this is evidently the case not only with the people as individuals and families, but in their community. It is more obvious, if possible, in the condition of the houses of worship, the schools, the roads, the public conveyances; finally, it accounts for what at first sight appears the marvellous neglect or waste of the natural resources of the country, and it no longer surprises me that a farmer points out a coal bed, which has never been worked, in the bank of a stream which has never been dammed, in the midst of a forest of fine timber trees, with clay and lime and sand convenient, and who yet lives in a miserable smoky cabin of logs on a diet almost exclusively formed of pounded maize and bacon. Nor, when I ask, if a little painstaking here and there would not save much waste of fertility, that he should reply, that inasmuch as land enough, equally good, can be bought for six dollars an acre, the whole fertile matter can be better lost than a week's labour be spent to save all that will not go into this year's crop.
To this general rule of make shift, there is but rare exception to the general rule of the difficulty or expense of accomplishing any ordinary aim of civilized, in distinction from savage society. I am inclined to think that there is none in Virginia. There are, however, individuals and localities and communities and enterprises, upon which the forces of wealth—including both capital and talent, or energy—seem to have concentrated, just as we sometimes observe to be the case at the North. It is true also, as Virginians are fond of asserting, that absolute destitution of the means of preserving life is more rare than at the North, but then life is barely preserved with little labour by a naked savage in the wilderness; and it must be said that a great number, I almost think a majority, of the
