Prosperity
In spite of the many drawbacks of the unworthy governors and their frequent quarrels with the assembly and people, Virginia continued to prosper, and by the end of the seventeenth century the population numbered a hundred thousand. The people up to this time were almost wholly English, but in 1700 several hundred Huguenots made their home in the colony. About 1730, the Scots-Irish began to settle in large numbers in the Shenandoah Valley, and soon after these came the Germans. The frontier was moved gradually westward from the tide-water counties until it had crossed the summit of the Alleghanies. The coming of these peoples infused new modes of life, new religious customs, new democratic ideas into Virginian society; and in the course of the next half century many vital changes were brought about, as the abolition of primogeniture and entail, the separation of Church and State, and religious toleration.18 Thus the various nationalities, blending slowly into one people, spent the remainder of the colonial period hewing away the forests and laying the foundations of a great state.(19)
Read more about this topic: Virginia Cavaliers (historical)
Famous quotes containing the word prosperity:
“Prosperity or egalitarianism—you have to choose. I favor freedom—you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)
“Throughout the 1980’s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)
“If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)