The transporting of convicts by England to her American Colonies--a far greater injustice to them than the later taxation by which they were lost to her--began early and was, in Virginia, at once and most vigourously opposed; but the everpressing demand for laborers seems to have rapidly modified the opposition, at least on the part of the larger proprietors whose power and influence was out of all proportion to their number; and it was not long before convicts were not only accepted without protest but even sought. It is the old story, in America as elsewhere, of a selfish economic advantage blinding those in power to the welfare of the State as a whole, although many continued to hold misgivings of the outcome. Thus we find Beverley in a later edition of his history, recording: "as for malefactors condemned to transportation, the greedy planters will always buy them, yet it is to be feared that they will be very injurious to the Country, which has already suffered many murders and robberies, the effect of that new law of England."[33] [33] He refers to the Act passed in 1718, on the transportation of convicts. But a loose assumption that all the convicts or prisoners arriving were moral derelicts, or those whose offense essentially involved moral depravity, and that the proportion these bore to others leaving Europe for Virginia fixes the ratio of their descendants or influence in the Old Dominion's later population, would be wholly and demonstrably untrue. We must be much more discerning and analytical than that and, as in another instance, look to our definitions.