The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. It seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the government. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture profitable in the north of France. Mulberries were first planted in England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony. Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees, "apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie" of Virginia. The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure. [Sidenote: A new silk fever.] [Sidenote: Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428.] [Sidenote: Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off.] [Sidenote: Phil. Trans. I, 201.] [Sidenote: Hening i, 14.] [Sidenote: Original Records of Colony of Va.] [Sidenote: Note 2.] [Sidenote: 1655.] [Sidenote: Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636.]