meet the expense of conveying persons to the Colony, or to buy them either as slaves or servants after they had been brought in by others, the ability to purchase a patent by the payment of a small sum in the Secretary’s office offered his only opportunity of securing an estate out of the public domain. A wealthy planter might wish to add to the area of the soil that had long been in his possession and under cultivation, an adjoining tract, which had never been taken up, to be used as a range for his stock or as the site for new tobacco fields. Under a strict operation of the law, his only resource under these circumstances was to import the number of persons who were required to assure him a title, or to purchase an equal number of certificates of head rights, but it is easily conceivable that it might not have been to his advantage to increase the band of servants and slaves already belonging to him. If the principle of the head right had in a case of this kind been carried out in full, the expense and annoyance entailed upon the planter in adding a body of outlying land not yet appropriated, to the property already owned by him, would have been so much out of proportion to the real value of the tract, that he would probably have foregone his intention altogether. It was due in a large measure to cases of this kind that the habit crept in towards the end of the century of granting patents upon a payment of a fee in the Secretary’s office. It did not have the countenance of law, but popular convenience suggested and sustained it. Its liability to gross abuse could not discredit the substantial reasons in which it had its origin. It was a modified form of purchase which had its only authority in custom, but in communities resembling those of Virginia in the seventeenth century, custom had all the force and influence of the most positive statute. It was only a question
