Tradition and habit doubtless brought to bear a strong influence in the subsequent history of Virginia to promote the cultivation of tobacco, but in the beginning it was an economic necessity, and in no small degree it continued to be such. If the climate and soil had been unsuitable to the growth of the plant, the advance of the Colony in the beginning would have been slower, confirming the remark of Lord Bacon, that a plantation should not be expected to become self-sustaining until a generation, or even a longer period of time had elapsed. In tobacco, the infant community found a product which was increasing in demand among the people of England as well as of the continent. As already stated, it was computed in 1613, that not less than two hundred thousand pounds sterling were spent by the former in the consumption of the leaf, a sum which in our modern currency perhaps amounted in purchasing power to five millions of dollars; ten years later the consumption must have been very much larger.
As it was impossible, for the different reasons which have been given, for Indian corn or wheat, rice or cotton, the silk-worm or the grape, to become in the beginning a profitable substitute for tobacco, so it was impossible for any other of the commodities not purely agricultural, produced in Virginia, to be made that basis of growth which was found in tobacco almost on the threshold of the history of the Colony. In 1610, the Company in London, bearing in mind one of the principal objects for which the new settlement had been established, that is, to supply the people of England with many, if not all of the articles they were compelled at that time to import from abroad, instructed the authorities in Virginia to return to the mother country the following: sassafras roots, bayberries, puccoon, galbrand, sarsaparilla, walnut
