In fact, the House of Burgesses, like the House of Commons, was becoming the dominating body, and the Council, like the House of Lords, was growing weaker. With the multiplying of the number of wealthy planters through the use of slave labor, the twelve men who made up the Council ceased to be the sole representatives of their interests. Many aristocrats were honored to have a seat in the Lower House. One has only to glance down the list of Burgesses to find many of the proudest names in colonial Virginia--Page, Harrison, Fairfax, Randolph, Burwell, Carter, Ball, Wormeley, Digges, Spotswood, Lee, Byrd, Claiborne, etc. So the aristocrat as well as the small farmer, the wealthy easterner as well as the pioneer of Orange or Albemarle, or the German of Frederick looked to the House to protect their interests. While the leadership of the House continued to be aristocratic, the rank and file grew more democratic. The open spaces of America fostered a spirit of independence. When men had gone into a wilderness, cleared openings in the forest, built their simple houses, laid out crops, fought the Indians, they became impatient of control by a group of eastern aristocrats, or by a government three thousand miles away in which they had no voice. Nor was democracy confined to the west, for the small farmer class of the east persisted despite the importation of thousands of slaves. It is true that many, finding it difficult to compete with slave labor, sold their little holdings, packed up their few household goods, and set out for the West or for one of the northern colonies. But others kept their heads above water by producing only the highest grades of tobacco, for which the blacks at first were not suited. "I must beg you to remember that the common people make the best," Gooch wrote in 1731. But this reprieve was only temporary, for in time the wealthy planter taught the Africans to produce even the high priced Orinoco. Then the poor planter had to join the class of slaveholders by making a few purchases, or sink into abject poverty. That thousands did buy slaves we know from an examination of the tax lists. In 1716, in Lancaster County, of some 200 slave-owners, 165 had from one to four only. The only large owner was the wealthy Robert Carter who had 126.[21] The replacing of the Virginia yeomanry, the men who cultivated their holdings with their own hands, by small slaveholders was in many ways a development to be deplored, but it saved the small farmer class from extinction, and democracy from a fatal blow. Without it all the eastern part of the colony and part of the Piedmont would have become a land of wealthy proprietors and their slaves, and ignorant, degraded, poverty-stricken whites.