MIGRATIONS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE 207 



streets were at times sent over from London to relieve the 

 city of them; and the governor, who was a pure euthenist, 

 and seemed to think the better environment would cure 

 their evil ways, welcomed all. However, in the middle of the 

 seventeenth century, protests went out from the colony 

 against being made a penal settlement, and in 1670 the 

 House of Burgesses passed an act prohibiting the importa- 

 tion of convicts, but such importations did not wholly cease 

 until declared illegal in Virginia in 1788. Perhaps 20,000 

 "convicts" altogether, by no means all immoral when 

 judged by our present standards, were imported into the 

 Virginia Colony (Butler, 1896). 



But a better blood soon crowded into Virginia to redeem 

 the colony. Upon the execution of Charles I (1649) a host of 

 royalist refugees sought an asylum here, and the immigration 

 of this class continued even after the Restoration. By this 

 means was enriched a germ plasm which easily developed 

 such traits as good manners, high culture, and the abiUty 

 to lead in all social affairs, — traits combined in remarkable 

 degree in the ''first families of Virginia." From this complex 

 and the similar complex of Maryland has come much of the 

 bad blood that found the retreats of the mountain valleys 

 toward Kentucky and Tennessee to its liking, and that spread 

 later into Indiana and Illinois and gave rise, in all probabil- 

 ity, to the Ishmaelites, a family of which hundreds have been 

 supported in the almshouses and jails of Indiana. From 

 this complex came also some of America's greatest statesmen 

 and military leaders; the Randolphs, the Marshalls, the 

 Madisons, the Curtises, the Lees, the Fitzhughs, the Wash- 

 ingtons and many others born with the instinct to command. 

 Such are the descendants of the high-spirited cavaliers. It 

 might have been predicted that the future state would be 

 the Mother of Presidents and that in a civil war the hardest 

 fought battles should be fought on her soil. 



