"Mr. W. also said that he cultivated only the coarser and lower-priced sorts of tobacco, because the finer sorts required more pains-taking and discretion than it was possible to make a large gang of negroes use. 'You can make a nigger work,' be said, 'but you cannot make him think.'" In speaking of the early tobacco culture of Virginia, he says:-- The light, rich mould resting on the sandy soil of Eastern Virginia was exactly suited to the cultivation of tobacco, and no better climate for this plant was to be found on the globe. This had just been sufficiently proved, and a suitable method of culture learned experimentally, when the land was offered to individual proprietors by the king, (James I.) Very little else was to be obtained from the soil which would be of value to send to Europe, without an application to it of a higher degree of art than the slaves, or stupid, careless servants of the proprietors could readily be forced to use. Although tobacco had been introduced into England but a few years, an enormous number of persons had initiated themselves in the appreciation of its mysterious value. "The king, having taken a violent prejudice against it, though he saw no harm in the distillation of grain, had forbidden that it should be cultivated in England. Virginia, therefore, had every advantage to supply the demand. Merchants and the super-cargoes of ships, arriving with slaves from Africa, or manufactured goods, spirits, or other luxuries from England, very gladly bartered them with the planters for tobacco, but for nothing else. Tobacco, therefore, stood for money, and the passion for raising it, to the exclusion of everything else, became a mania, like the 'California fever' of 1849. "The culture being once established, there were many reasons growing out of the social structure of the colony, which, for more than a century, kept the industry of the Virginians confined to this one staple. These reasons were chiefly the difficulty of breaking the slaves, or training the bond-servants to new methods of labor, the want of enterprise or ingenuity of the proprietors to contrive other profitable occupations for them, and the difficulty or expense of distributing the guard or oversight, without which it was impossible to get any work done at all, if the laborers were separated, or worked in any other way than side by side, in gangs, as in the tobacco-fields.