In 1618 a scheme was set on foot for taking up vagrant boys and girls that lay begging in the streets of the city, having neither home nor friends, and transporting them to Virginia to be there industriously employed. The scheme came before the Court of Common Council on the 31st July in the form of a petition from a number of citizens. A committee was at once appointed to consider the matter, and on the 24th September they brought in their report.(156) The Virginia Company had agreed to take 100 boys and girls between the ages of eight and sixteen, and to educate and bring them up at the company’s charge. The company were prepared, moreover, to give each boy and girl fifty acres of land, to each boy as soon as he was twenty-four years of age, and to each girl at the age of twenty-one or her marriage, whichever should first happen. The charge of fitting out and transporting that number was estimated at £500, which sum the court agreed should be levied on the inhabitants of the city rateably according as each was assessed towards the last poor rate. The young emigrants were soon afterwards shipped to their new home,(157) and so successfully did the undertaking turn out that in little over a year another application was made to the Common Council (18 Dec., 1619) for another batch of 100 children for shipment to the colony in the following spring.(158) It was desired that the new emigrants should be twelve years old and upwards, with an allowance of £3 apiece for their transportation and 40_s._ apiece for their apparel, "as was formerly graunted." The boys would be put out as apprentices until the age of twenty-one, and the girls likewise until the same age or marriage, after which they would be placed as tenants on the public lands, and be furnished with houses, stock of corn and cattle to begin with, and afterwards enjoy the moiety of all increase and profit. The Common Council being desirous of forwarding "soe worthy and pious a worke" as the plantation, accepted the company’s proposal, and directed that a sum of £500 necessary for the purpose should be levied as on the previous occasion. (M65)