So far from anything being done to lessen the pressure of the Navigation Act on the Anglo-American colonies, the following parliament increased its stringency, and the colonists were prohibited from shipping their produce, known under the term “enumerated articles,” to any other market than that of England; and from importing any European commodities otherwise than through the English merchant. This law, which pressed heavily on New England, was fatal to Virginia, whose sole staple was tobacco, and who depended on the New England trader, whose commercial dealings were already of a European character, and who contrived for a long time to set the law at defiance. It was different with Virginia,—she had no ships of her own; custom-houses sealed her ports; her market was restricted, and the prices of all foreign goods, coming to her through the English merchant, were increased. While these arbitrary and unjust laws were crippling her commerce, a fatal change was also taking place in her constitution. The first assembly elected after the Restoration consisted almost entirely of the aristocratic party, whose first measures were to revise the legislative code, and weed out those democratic tendencies which had been introduced during the period of self-government. Under this new, or rather this revival of the original constitution, the English episcopal church became the religion of the state, with its canons, liturgy and catechism. And though, as we have said, there were only about ten ministers in the fifty parishes, yet strict conformity was required, and every one was taxed for the support of the established church. Glebes and parsonages were to be provided with a maintenance of not less than fourscore pounds to each clergyman, besides fees and perquisites; for any funeral sermon, 400 pounds weight of tobacco; marriage published by banns, fifty pounds; by licence, two hundred pounds. Nonconformist preachers were to be silenced or sent out of the country. Quakers, who “gathered together unlawful assemblies, teaching and publishing lies and false doctrines,” were to be imprisoned without trial till they could be sent out of the colony, and treated as felons on their return. Among other enactments we find that any “who, out of new-fangled conceits of their own heretical invention, refuse to have their children baptized by the lawful minister,” shall be subjected to a fine of 2,000 pounds weight of tobacco. And a member of the assembly, being accused of favouring Anabaptist and Quaker opinions, was expelled. All this severity, however, had not so much the effect of destroying as of diffusing these “heresies.” Men and women, to whom the great wilderness had been as the temple of God, in which the spirit had taught them divine things, now that bigotry and intolerance commenced their pitiless work in Virginia, removed into the new state of North Carolina, and took deep root there, as we have seen.