But Heaven and kind masters make up all those things to a diligent servant; and I mention it because people who are either transported or otherwise trepanned into those places are generally thought to be rendered miserable and undone; whereas, on the contrary, I would encourage them, upon my own experience, to depend upon it, that if their own diligence in the time of service gains them but a good character, which it will certainly do if they can deserve it, there is not the poorest and most despicable felon that ever went over but may, after his time is served, begin for himself, and may in time be sure of raising a good plantation. For example, I will now take a man in the meanest circumstances of a servant, who has served out his five or seven years; suppose a transported wretch for seven years. The custom of the place was then—what it is since I know not—that on his master’s certifying that he had served his time out faithfully, he had fifty acres of land allotted him for planting, and on this plan he begins. Some had a horse, a cow, and three hogs given, or rather lent, them, as a stock for the land, which they made an allowance for at a certain time and rate. Custom has made it a trade to give credit to such beginners as these for tools, clothes, nails, ironwork, and other things necessary for their planting, and which the persons so giving credit to them are to be paid for out of the crop of tobacco which they shall plant. Nor is it in the debtor’s power to defraud the creditor of payment in that manner; and as tobacco is their coin as well as their product, so all things are to be purchased at a certain quantity of tobacco, the price being so rated. Thus the naked planter has credit at his beginning, and immediately goes to work to cure the land and plant tobacco; and from this little beginning have some of the most considerable planters in Virginia, and in Maryland also, raised themselves—namely, from being without a hat or a shoe to estates of £40,000 or £50,000; and in this method, I may add, no diligent man ever miscarried, if he had health to work and was a good husband; for he every year increases a little, and every year adding more land and planting more tobacco, which is real money, he must gradually increase in substance, till at length he gets enough to buy negroes and other servants, and then never works himself any more. In a word, every Newgate wretch, every desperate forlorn creature, the most despicable ruined man in the world, has here a fair opportunity put into his hands to begin the world again, and that upon a foot of certain gain and in a method exactly honest, with a reputation that nothing past will have any effect upon; and innumerable people have raised themselves from the worst circumstances in the world—namely, from the cells in Newgate.