compelled to take a long leap mentally in order to land ourselves
securely in the Virginia which honored the second George, and looked
up to Walpole and Pitt as the arbiters of its fate.

We live in a period of great cities, rapid communication, vast and
varied business interests, enormous diversity of occupation, great
industries, diffused intelligence, farming by steam, and with
everything and everybody pervaded by an unresting, high-strung
activity. We transport ourselves to the Virginia of Washington's
boyhood, and find a people without cities or towns, with no means
of communication except what was afforded by rivers and wood roads;
having no trades, no industries, no means of spreading knowledge, only
one occupation, clumsily performed; and living a quiet, monotonous
existence, which can now hardly be realized. It is "a far cry to
Loch-Awe," as the Scotch proverb has it; and this old Virginian
society, although we should find it sorry work living in it, is both
pleasant and picturesque in the pages of history.

The population of Virginia, advancing toward half a million, and
divided pretty equally between the free whites and the enslaved
blacks, was densest, to use a most inappropriate word, at the water's
edge and near the mouths of the rivers. Thence it crept backwards,
following always the lines of the watercourses, and growing ever
thinner and more scattered until it reached the Blue Ridge. Behind
the mountains was the wilderness, haunted, as old John Lederer said a
century earlier, by monsters, and inhabited, as the eighteenth-century
Virginians very well knew, by savages and wild beasts, much more real
and dangerous than the hobgoblins of their ancestors.

The population, in proportion to its numbers, was very widely