Since the main road to wealth and influence in Virginia was the raising of tobacco, every emigrant with capital to invest at once became a landowner; and the conditions of tobacco-planting disposed him to enlarge his estate as rapidly as possible. It is true that one advantage of tobacco over other products was its high acreage value. But the price ordinarily was low, and many acres were necessary for large net returns. Besides, the soil was soon exhausted, so that the successful planter found it necessary to be always acquiring new land in order to let the old lie fallow. It thus happened that, in spite of the cost of clearing and the danger from the Indians, Virginia was not settled, as its founders had intended, in compact towns modeled upon the English borough, but in widely separated plantation groups, stretching far up on both sides of the James River. The average size of patents granted before 1649 was about four hundred and fifty acres; in the period between 1666 and 1679 the average had risen to nearly nine hundred, while there were ten patents ranging from ten to twenty thousand acres each. By 1685 a total population not exceeding that of the London parish of Stepney had acquired title to an area as large as all England. For clearing and planting so large an area much unskilled labor was essential. In Virginia, and in all the Southern colonies with the exception of North Carolina, there accordingly existed, side by side with the landowning planter class, and sharply distinct from it, a servile laboring class which formed a large part of the total population. In 1619, we are told, "came a Dutch man of war with 20 negars." The ship was probably English rather than Dutch. In either case the circumstance marks the beginning of African slavery in the English continental colonies; but the importation of slaves was slight until the close of the century, and the laborers who cleared the forests and worked the fields were largely supplied by contract, and were known as "servants." The servant was a person bound over for a term of years to the planter who paid his transportation or purchased the contract right from its original owner. The term of service varied from two to seven years, at the expiration of which the servant became a freeman. Ex-servants sometimes migrated to other colonies, notably to North Carolina after the foundation of that colony, or in the next century to the up-country beyond the "fall line"; but many became renters or tenants on the estates of the large planters, or in time became planters themselves. The servant class included some condemned criminals and political offenders, and some educated and cultured people who had fallen on evil times; but they came mostly from the jails, the almshouses, or the London streets. They were the unfortunate and the dispossessed rather than the vicious--men who were vagabonds because there was nothing for them to do, or petty thieves because they were starving.