Strict laws which pronounced penalties for profaneness and for not attending church, connived at the systematic defrauding and swindling of the Indians of land and furs. Two strong considerations were held to justify this. The first was that the Indians were heathen and must give way to civilization; that they were fair prey. The demands of trade, upon which the colonies flourished was the second. The fact was that the code of the trading class was everywhere gradually becoming the dominant one, even breaking down the austere, almost ascetic, Puritan moral professions. Among the common people--those who were ordinary wage laborers--the methods of the rich were looked upon with suspicion and enmity, and there was a prevalent consciousness that wealth was being amassed by one-sided laws and fraud. Some of the noted sea pirates of the age made this their strong justification for preying upon commerce.[36] In Virginia the life of the community depended upon agriculture; therefore slavery was thought to be its labor prop and was joyfully welcomed and earnestly defended. In Massachusetts and New York trading was an elemental factor, and whatever swelled the volume and profits was accounted a blessing to the community and was held justified. Laws, the judges who enforced them, and the spirit of the age reflected not so much the morality of the people as their trading necessities. The one was often mistaken for the other. THE BONDING OF LABORERS. This condition was shown repeatedly in the trade conflicts of the competing merchants, their system of bonded laborers and in the long contests between the traders of the colonies and those of England, culminating in the Revolution. In the churches the colonists prayed to God as the Father of all men and showed great humility. But in actual practice the propertied men recognized no such thing as equality and dispensed with humility. The merchants imitated in a small way the seignorial pretensions of the land nabobs. Few merchants there were who did not deal in negro slaves, and few also were there who did not have a bonded laborer or two, whose labor they monopolized and whose career was their property for a long term of years. Limited bondage, called apprenticeship, was general.