Although nature has done almost everything for the inhabitants of the
Sandwich islands--though they enjoy a perpetual spring, a clear sky, a
salubrious climate, and scarcely any labor is required to produce the
necessaries of life--they can not be regarded as generally happy: the
artisans and producers, whom they call _Tootoos_, are nearly in the same
situation as the Helots among the Lacedemonians, condemned to labor
almost incessantly for their lord or _Eris_, without hope of bettering
their condition, and even restricted in the choice of their daily
food.[F] How has it happened that among a people yet barbarous, where
knowledge is nearly equally distributed, the class which is beyond
comparison the most numerous has voluntarily submitted to such a
humiliating and oppressive yoke? The Tartars, though infinitely less
numerous than the Chinese, have subjected them, because the former were
warlike and the latter were not. The same thing has happened, no doubt,
at remote periods, in Poland, and other regions of Europe and Asia. If
moral causes are joined to physical ones, the superiority of one caste
and the inferiority of the other will be still more marked; it is known
that the natives of Hispaniola, when they saw the Spaniards arrive on
their coast, in vessels of an astonishing size to their apprehensions,
and heard them imitate the thunder with their cannon, took them for
beings of a superior nature to their own. Supposing that this island had
been extremely remote from every other country, and that the Spaniards,
after conquering it, had held no further communication with any
civilized land, at the end of a century or two the language and the
manners would have assimilated, but there would have been two castes,
one of lords, enjoying all the advantages, the other of serfs, charged
with all the burdens. This theory seems to have been realized anciently
in Hindostan; but if we must credit the tradition of the
Sandwich-islanders, their country was originally peopled by a man and
woman, who came to Owyhee in a canoe. Unless, then, they mean that this