time that the whole community was engaged in planting it. It was the money in which all the supplies, both domestic and imported, were purchased; in which the tax imposed by the public levy was settled; in which the tithables of the minister, the fees of the attorney and the physician, the debts due the merchant, the remuneration of the free mechanic, the wages of the servant, the charges of the midwife and the grave-digger were paid. In no similar instance has an agricultural product entered so deeply and so extensively into the spirit and framework of any modern community. It was to the Colony what the potato has been to Ireland, the coffee-berry to Brazil, the grape to France, and corn to Egypt; and it was also something more. It was, as it were, at once an agricultural and a metallic commodity, which, owing to the perverse taste of mankind, was as valuable in itself as the potato, the coffee-berry, the grape, the grain of wheat, and at the same moment as precious as gold or silver and more precious than iron. It was as if men had substituted the barns in their yards for purses in their pockets. The universal use into which tobacco came as currency, arose, not from the preference of the settlers, but by the force of circumstances which they could not have controlled even if they had wished to. In the beginning, there was no need for a medium of exchange. It was the exchange only which was wanted. Virginia raised tobacco to barter for English clothing, tools, utensils, and implements that were indispensable to the people, and which they themselves could not at that early period manufacture. The Magazine established in 1616, the contents of which were delivered by the Cape Merchant to the planters in return for tobacco, could only have maintained its existence in a country in which the original principle of trade was operating
