That the surplus population would readily flow into the colonies, to the advantage of all concerned, was the common belief. For successful colonization, said the author of _Nova Britannia_ in 1609, but two things are essential, people and money; and "for the first wee need not doubt, our land abounding with swarms of idle persons, so that if wee seeke not some waies for their foreine employment, wee must provide shortly more prisons and corrections for their bad conditions." Yet for more than a decade one of the chief difficulties of the Virginia Company was to procure settlers. Reports from Virginia were discouraging. The prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the company had "to take any that could be got of any sort on any terms." Little wonder that the colony for many years barely survived. It survived only by taking on the character of a penal camp, in which the settlers worked for the company that fed them, and ordered their daily routine by the regulations of martial law. The settlement was doubtless saved from destruction, but it did not greatly prosper, under the military and joint-stock regime; for "when our people were fed out of the common store, glad was he who could slip from his labour or slumber over his task he cared not how." The first step in the abolition of the joint stock was taken in 1616 when Sir Thomas Dale "allotted to every man three acres of land in the nature of farms." It was the beginning of better things, since not even the most honest men, when working for the company, "would take so much pains in a weeke as now for themselves they would do in a day." The first general distribution was made in 1618, and within a few years the communistic system was a thing of the past. Throughout the century the "head right" was the nominal basis for the granting of land: fifty acres were regarded as the equivalent of the cost of transporting one colonist. But in fact the head right was customarily evaded. The payment of from one to five shillings was usually sufficient to secure title to fifty acres, and in 1705 the practice was legalized. Titles so secured were burdened with the payment of a small quit-rent to the state; but the quit-rent was difficult to collect, was often in arrears, and sometimes never paid.